U.S. flag   An official website of the United States government
Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (Dot gov) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

CVE-2025-38591 Detail

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: bpf: Reject narrower access to pointer ctx fields The following BPF program, simplified from a syzkaller repro, causes a kernel warning: r0 = *(u8 *)(r1 + 169); exit; With pointer field sk being at offset 168 in __sk_buff. This access is detected as a narrower read in bpf_skb_is_valid_access because it doesn't match offsetof(struct __sk_buff, sk). It is therefore allowed and later proceeds to bpf_convert_ctx_access. Note that for the "is_narrower_load" case in the convert_ctx_accesses(), the insn->off is aligned, so the cnt may not be 0 because it matches the offsetof(struct __sk_buff, sk) in the bpf_convert_ctx_access. However, the target_size stays 0 and the verifier errors with a kernel warning: verifier bug: error during ctx access conversion(1) This patch fixes that to return a proper "invalid bpf_context access off=X size=Y" error on the load instruction. The same issue affects multiple other fields in context structures that allow narrow access. Some other non-affected fields (for sk_msg, sk_lookup, and sockopt) were also changed to use bpf_ctx_range_ptr for consistency. Note this syzkaller crash was reported in the "Closes" link below, which used to be about a different bug, fixed in commit fce7bd8e385a ("bpf/verifier: Handle BPF_LOAD_ACQ instructions in insn_def_regno()"). Because syzbot somehow confused the two bugs, the new crash and repro didn't get reported to the mailing list.


Metrics

NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

By selecting these links, you will be leaving NIST webspace. We have provided these links to other web sites because they may have information that would be of interest to you. No inferences should be drawn on account of other sites being referenced, or not, from this page. There may be other web sites that are more appropriate for your purpose. NIST does not necessarily endorse the views expressed, or concur with the facts presented on these sites. Further, NIST does not endorse any commercial products that may be mentioned on these sites. Please address comments about this page to [email protected].

URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/202900ceeef67458c964c2af6e1427c8e533ea7c kernel.org
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e09299225d5ba3916c91ef70565f7d2187e4cca0 kernel.org

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2025-38591
NVD Published Date:
08/19/2025
NVD Last Modified:
08/20/2025
Source:
kernel.org