CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-21981 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ice: fix memory leak in aRFS after reset Fix aRFS (accelerated Receive Flow Steering) structures memory leak by adding a checker to verify if aRFS memory is already allocated while configuring VSI. aRFS objects are allocated in two cases: - as part of VSI initialization (at probe), and - as part of reset handling However, VSI reconfiguration executed during reset involves memory allocation one more time, without prior releasing already allocated resources. This led to the memory leak with the following signature: [root@os-delivery ~]# cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak unreferenced object 0xff3c1ca7252e6000 (size 8192): comm "kworker/0:0", pid 8, jiffies 4296833052 hex dump (first 32 bytes): 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ backtrace (crc 0): [<ffffffff991ec485>] __kmalloc_cache_noprof+0x275/0x340 [<ffffffffc0a6e06a>] ice_init_arfs+0x3a/0xe0 [ice] [<ffffffffc09f1027>] ice_vsi_cfg_def+0x607/0x850 [ice] [<ffffffffc09f244b>] ice_vsi_setup+0x5b/0x130 [ice] [<ffffffffc09c2131>] ice_init+0x1c1/0x460 [ice] [<ffffffffc09c64af>] ic…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-04-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.14

Showing 2 representative product identities from 10 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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