Vulnerability in Linux
CVE-2025-39946
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: tls: make sure to abort the stream if headers are bogus Normally we wait for the socket to buffer up the whole record before we service it. If the socket has a tiny buffer, however, we read out the data sooner, to prevent connection stalls. Make sure that we abort the connection when we find out late that the record is actually invalid. Retrying the parsing is fine in itself but since we copy some more data each time before we parse we can overflow the allocated skb space. Constructing a scenario in which we're under pressure without enough data in the socket to parse the length upfront is quite hard. syzbot figured out a way to do this by serving us the header in small OOB sends, and then filling in the recvbuf with a large normal send. Make sure that tls_rx_msg_size() aborts strp, if we reach an invalid record there's really no way to recover.
EPSS: 0.089 (94.7th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 9.8 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.
Affected products
- Linux — versions 84c61fe1a75b4255df1e1e7c054c9e6d048da417, 6.0, 0
- Linux Linux_kernel — versions 6.17
Public proof-of-concept exploits
References
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2025-39946?
- CVE-2025-39946 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 9.8/10. Published 2025-10-04.
- How severe is CVE-2025-39946?
- Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 9.8 out of 10.
- Is CVE-2025-39946 known to be exploited?
- 5 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.