CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-38549 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: efivarfs: Fix memory leak of efivarfs_fs_info in fs_context error paths When processing mount options, efivarfs allocates efivarfs_fs_info (sfi) early in fs_context initialization. However, sfi is associated with the superblock and typically freed when the superblock is destroyed. If the fs_context is released (final put) before fill_super is called—such as on error paths or during reconfiguration—the sfi structure would leak, as ownership never transfers to the superblock. Implement the .free callback in efivarfs_context_ops to ensure any allocated sfi is properly freed if the fs_context is torn down before fill_super, preventing this memory leak.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-08-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 6.16

Showing 2 representative product identities from 8 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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