CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-38124 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: fix udp gso skb_segment after pull from frag_list Commit a1e40ac5b5e9 ("net: gso: fix udp gso fraglist segmentation after pull from frag_list") detected invalid geometry in frag_list skbs and redirects them from skb_segment_list to more robust skb_segment. But some packets with modified geometry can also hit bugs in that code. We don't know how many such cases exist. Addressing each one by one also requires touching the complex skb_segment code, which risks introducing bugs for other types of skbs. Instead, linearize all these packets that fail the basic invariants on gso fraglist skbs. That is more robust. If only part of the fraglist payload is pulled into head_skb, it will always cause exception when splitting skbs by skb_segment. For detailed call stack information, see below. Valid SKB_GSO_FRAGLIST skbs - consist of two or more segments - the head_skb holds the protocol headers plus first gso_size - one or more frag_list skbs hold exactly one segment - all but the last must be gso_size Optional datapath hooks such as NAT and BPF (bpf_skb_pull_data) can modify fraglist skbs, breaking these invariants. In…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-07-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.12

Showing 2 representative product identities from 14 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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