NULL pointer dereference in Linux

CVE-2025-38516

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: pinctrl: qcom: msm: mark certain pins as invalid for interrupts On some platforms, the UFS-reset pin has no interrupt logic in TLMM but is nevertheless registered as a GPIO in the kernel. This enables the user-space to trigger a BUG() in the pinctrl-msm driver by running, for example: `gpiomon -c 0 113` on RB2. The exact culprit is requesting pins whose intr_detection_width setting is not 1 or 2 for interrupts. This hits a BUG() in msm_gpio_irq_set_type(). Potentially crashing the kernel due to an invalid request from user-space is not optimal, so let's go through the pins and mark those that would fail the check as invalid for the irq chip as we should not even register them as available irqs. This function can be extended if we determine that there are more corner-cases like this.

EPSS: 0.002 (5.6th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

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.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-38516?
CVE-2025-38516 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux, classified under NULL Pointer Dereference. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2025-08-16.
How severe is CVE-2025-38516?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.
Is CVE-2025-38516 known to be exploited?
1 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.