CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-37989 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: phy: leds: fix memory leak A network restart test on a router led to an out-of-memory condition, which was traced to a memory leak in the PHY LED trigger code. The root cause is misuse of the devm API. The registration function (phy_led_triggers_register) is called from phy_attach_direct, not phy_probe, and the unregister function (phy_led_triggers_unregister) is called from phy_detach, not phy_remove. This means the register and unregister functions can be called multiple times for the same PHY device, but devm-allocated memory is not freed until the driver is unbound. This also prevents kmemleak from detecting the leak, as the devm API internally stores the allocated pointer. Fix this by replacing devm_kzalloc/devm_kcalloc with standard kzalloc/kcalloc, and add the corresponding kfree calls in the unregister path.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-05-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.15
  • debian / debian_linux / 11.0

Showing 3 representative product identities from 11 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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