Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2025-38351

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: x86/hyper-v: Skip non-canonical addresses during PV TLB flush In KVM guests with Hyper-V hypercalls enabled, the hypercalls HVCALL_FLUSH_VIRTUAL_ADDRESS_LIST and HVCALL_FLUSH_VIRTUAL_ADDRESS_LIST_EX allow a guest to request invalidation of portions of a virtual TLB. For this, the hypercall parameter includes a list of GVAs that are supposed to be invalidated. However, when non-canonical GVAs are passed, there is currently no filtering in place and they are eventually passed to checked invocations of INVVPID on Intel / INVLPGA on AMD. While AMD's INVLPGA silently ignores non-canonical addresses (effectively a no-op), Intel's INVVPID explicitly signals VM-Fail and ultimately triggers the WARN_ONCE in invvpid_error(): invvpid failed: ext=0x0 vpid=1 gva=0xaaaaaaaaaaaaa000 WARNING: CPU: 6 PID: 326 at arch/x86/kvm/vmx/vmx.c:482 invvpid_error+0x91/0xa0 [kvm_intel] Modules linked in: kvm_intel kvm 9pnet_virtio irqbypass fuse CPU: 6 UID: 0 PID: 326 Comm: kvm-vm Not tainted 6.15.0 #14 PREEMPT(voluntary) RIP: 0010:invvpid_error+0x91/0xa0 [kvm_intel] Call Trace: vmx_flush_tlb_gva+0x320/0x490 [kvm_intel] kvm_hv_vcpu_flush_tlb+0x24f/0x4f0 [kvm] kvm_arch_vcpu_ioctl_run+0x3013/0x5810 [kvm] Hyper-V documents that invalid GVAs (those that are beyond a partition's GVA space) are to be ignored. While not completely clear whether this ruling also applies to non-canonical GVAs, it is likely fine to make that assumption, and manual testing on Azure confirms "real" Hyper-V interprets the specification in the same way. Skip non-canonical GVAs when processing the list of address to avoid tripping the INVVPID failure. Alternatively, KVM could filter out "bad" GVAs before inserting into the FIFO, but practically speaking the only downside of pushing validation to the final processing is that doing so is suboptimal for the guest, and no well-behaved guest will request TLB flushes for non-canonical addresses.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (5.6th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 6th percentile — 5.6% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2025-38351: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: +0.000

Affected products

  • Linux — versions 260970862c88b4130e9e12be023c7e2c2d37a966, 6.2, 0
  • Linux Kernel — versions 6.16

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-38351?
CVE-2025-38351 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2025-07-19.
How severe is CVE-2025-38351?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.
Is CVE-2025-38351 known to be exploited?
2 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.