Vulnerability in Linux
CVE-2025-40249
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: gpio: cdev: make sure the cdev fd is still active before emitting events With the final call to fput() on a file descriptor, the release action may be deferred and scheduled on a work queue. The reference count of that descriptor is still zero and it must not be used. It's possible that a GPIO change, we want to notify the user-space about, happens AFTER the reference count on the file descriptor associated with the character device went down to zero but BEFORE the .release() callback was called from the workqueue and so BEFORE we unregistered from the notifier. Using the regular get_file() routine in this situation triggers the following warning: struct file::f_count incremented from zero; use-after-free condition present! So use the get_file_active() variant that will return NULL on file descriptors that have been or are being released.
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
- Linux — versions 40b7c49950bd56c984b1f6722f865b922879260e, 6.13, 0
References
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2025-40249?
- CVE-2025-40249 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2025-12-04.
- How severe is CVE-2025-40249?
- High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.