CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-38643 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: cfg80211: Add missing lock in cfg80211_check_and_end_cac() Callers of wdev_chandef() must hold the wiphy mutex. But the worker cfg80211_propagate_cac_done_wk() never takes the lock. Which triggers the warning below with the mesh_peer_connected_dfs test from hostapd and not (yet) released mac80211 code changes: WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 495 at net/wireless/chan.c:1552 wdev_chandef+0x60/0x165 Modules linked in: CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 495 Comm: kworker/u4:2 Not tainted 6.14.0-rc5-wt-g03960e6f9d47 #33 13c287eeabfe1efea01c0bcc863723ab082e17cf Workqueue: cfg80211 cfg80211_propagate_cac_done_wk Stack: 00000000 00000001 ffffff00 6093267c 00000000 6002ec30 6d577c50 60037608 00000000 67e8d108 6063717b 00000000 Call Trace: [<6002ec30>] ? _printk+0x0/0x98 [<6003c2b3>] show_stack+0x10e/0x11a [<6002ec30>] ? _printk+0x0/0x98 [<60037608>] dump_stack_lvl+0x71/0xb8 [<6063717b>] ? wdev_chandef+0x60/0x165 [<6003766d>] dump_stack+0x1e/0x20 [<6005d1b7>] __warn+0x101/0x20f [<6005d3a8>] warn_slowpath_fmt+0xe3/0x15d [<600b0c5c>] ? mark_lock.part.0+0x0/0x4ec [<60751191>] ? __this_cpu_preempt_check+0x0/0x16 [<600b11a2>] ? mark_held_locks+0x5a/…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-08-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-667

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 5.5

Showing 2 representative product identities from 9 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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