CVE-2025-38089

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel, where a specially crafted RPC packet could cause data corruption or trigger a system panic. This flaw allows a remote attacker who can make RPC calls to send an intentionally malformed packet, potentially compromising system integrity or causing a denial of service (DoS).

This vulnerability is caused by incorrect error handling in the Linux kernel's RPC code. When a malformed packet is sent during RPC authentication, the kernel does not correctly set an authorization status field pointer to a sensible value. When that pointer is later dereferenced, an affected system might either crash due to a NULL pointer dereference, or garbage data might be written to another memory address, impacting system integrity.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Red Hat has investigated whether a possible mitigation exists for this issue, and has not been able to identify a practical example. Please update the affected package as soon as possible. Additionally, to protect against this and other similar vulnerabilities, ensure appropriate access controls are in place to prevent unauthorized use of RPC-based services.

If SunRPC not being used, then to mitigate this issue to prevent the sunrpc module from being loaded. Please see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/41278 for information on how to blacklist a kernel module to prevent it from loading automatically.