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.

Published · last modified .

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.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.096 (95.3th percentile), scored .

Low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, but still tracked. 95th percentile — 95.3% 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-2025-39946: rose from 0.089 to 0.096.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.089 · newest: 0.096 · change: +0.006

Affected products

  • Linux — versions 84c61fe1a75b4255df1e1e7c054c9e6d048da417, 6.0, 0
  • 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.