CVE-2025-38735: high-severity vulnerability in Linux
gve: prevent ethtool ops after shutdown
Published · Updated
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.8epss 0.2%
exploitation probability
0.2%top 94% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
gve: prevent ethtool ops after shutdown
A crash can occur if an ethtool operation is invoked
after shutdown() is called.
shutdown() is invoked during system shutdown to stop DMA operations
without performing expensive deallocations. It is discouraged to
unregister the netdev in this path, so the device may still be visible
to userspace and kernel helpers.
In gve, shutdown() tears down most internal data structures. If an
ethtool operation is dispatched after shutdown(), it will dereference
freed or NULL pointers, leading to a kernel panic. While graceful
shutdown normally quiesces userspace before invoking the reboot
syscall, forced shutdowns (as observed on GCP VMs) can still trigger
this path.
Fix by calling netif_device_detach() in shutdown().
This marks the device as detached so the ethtool ioctl handler
will skip dispatching operations to the driver.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
Linux · LinuxRelated CVEs — Linux
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-53197HIGHALSA: usb-audio: Fix potential out-of-bound accesses for Extigy and Mbox devicesEPSS 4.1%KEVCVE-2026-31431HIGHcrypto: algif_aead - Revert to operating out-of-placeEPSS 3.4%KEVCVE-2024-53104HIGHmedia: uvcvideo: Skip parsing frames of type UVC_VS_UNDEFINED in uvc_parse_formatEPSS 3.4%KEVCVE-2025-39682CRITICALtls: fix handling of zero-length records on the rx_listEPSS 2.9%KEVCVE-2024-36971HIGHnet: fix __dst_negative_advice() raceEPSS 2.7%KEVCVE-2025-39964HIGHcrypto: af_alg - Disallow concurrent writes in af_alg_sendmsgEPSS 1.4%KEV
References
https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/html/ssa-032379.htmlhttps://git.kernel.org/stable/c/48a4e89d50e8ea52e800bc7865970b92fcf4647chttps://git.kernel.org/stable/c/75a9a46d67f46d608205888f9b34e315c1786345https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9d8a41e9a4ff83ff666de811e7f012167cdc00e9https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a7efffeecb881b4649fdc30de020ef910f35d646https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ba51d73408edf815cbaeab148625576c2dd90192https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/10/msg00008.html