CVE-2025-38377
kernel: rose: fix dangling neighbour pointers in rose_rt_device_down()
Severity
UnknownRed Hat Product Security
CVSS
Review impact separately from score.
Published · July 25, 2025
Updated · October 30, 2026
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
rose: fix dangling neighbour pointers in rose_rt_device_down()
There are two bugs in rose_rt_device_down() that can cause use-after-free:
-
The loop bound
t->countis modified within the loop, which can cause the loop to terminate early and miss some entries. -
When removing an entry from the neighbour array, the subsequent entries are moved up to fill the gap, but the loop index
iis still incremented, causing the next entry to be skipped.
For example, if a node has three neighbours (A, A, B) with count=3 and A is being removed, the second A is not checked.
i=0: (A, A, B) -> (A, B) with count=2
^ checked
i=1: (A, B) -> (A, B) with count=2
^ checked (B, not A!)
i=2: (doesn't occur because i < count is false)
This leaves the second A in the array with count=2, but the rose_neigh
structure has been freed. Code that accesses these entries assumes that
the first count entries are valid pointers, causing a use-after-free
when it accesses the dangling pointer.
Fix both issues by iterating over the array in reverse order with a fixed loop bound. This ensures that all entries are examined and that the removal of an entry doesn't affect subsequent iterations.
Statement
This vulnerability poses no security risk to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the required ROSE amateur radio networking protocol is not enabled in supported kernel builds. The flaw involves a memory management issue occurring during interface teardown in configurations utilizing the amateur radio stack. Because the affected subsystem is omitted from supported kernels, Red Hat deployments are not exposed to this issue.
Mitigation
No mitigation is specified in collected source.
CVSS / CWE
CWE not specified