Use After Free in Linux

CVE-2025-38703

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/xe: Make dma-fences compliant with the safe access rules Xe can free some of the data pointed to by the dma-fences it exports. Most notably the timeline name can get freed if userspace closes the associated submit queue. At the same time the fence could have been exported to a third party (for example a sync_fence fd) which will then cause an use- after-free on subsequent access. To make this safe we need to make the driver compliant with the newly documented dma-fence rules. Driver has to ensure a RCU grace period between signalling a fence and freeing any data pointed to by said fence. For the timeline name we simply make the queue be freed via kfree_rcu and for the shared lock associated with multiple queues we add a RCU grace period before freeing the per GT structure holding the lock.

Vulnerability class: Use-After-Free

EPSS: 0.002 (6.2th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.8 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-38703?
CVE-2025-38703 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux, classified under Use After Free. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2025-09-04.
How severe is CVE-2025-38703?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.