CVE-2025-38681

Published Sep 4, 2025

Last updated 4 days ago

CVSS medium 4.7

Overview

Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/ptdump: take the memory hotplug lock inside ptdump_walk_pgd() Memory hot remove unmaps and tears down various kernel page table regions as required. The ptdump code can race with concurrent modifications of the kernel page tables. When leaf entries are modified concurrently, the dump code may log stale or inconsistent information for a VA range, but this is otherwise not harmful. But when intermediate levels of kernel page table are freed, the dump code will continue to use memory that has been freed and potentially reallocated for another purpose. In such cases, the ptdump code may dereference bogus addresses, leading to a number of potential problems. To avoid the above mentioned race condition, platforms such as arm64, riscv and s390 take memory hotplug lock, while dumping kernel page table via the sysfs interface /sys/kernel/debug/kernel_page_tables. Similar race condition exists while checking for pages that might have been marked W+X via /sys/kernel/debug/kernel_page_tables/check_wx_pages which in turn calls ptdump_check_wx(). Instead of solving this race condition again, let's just move the memory hotplug lock inside generic ptdump_check_wx() which will benefit both the scenarios. Drop get_online_mems() and put_online_mems() combination from all existing platform ptdump code paths.
Source
416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67
NVD status
Modified
Products
linux_kernel, debian_linux

Risk scores

CVSS 3.1

Type
Primary
Base score
4.7
Impact score
3.6
Exploitability score
1
Vector string
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Severity
MEDIUM

Weaknesses

nvd@nist.gov
CWE-362

Social media

Hype score
Not currently trending

  1. CVE-2025-38681 In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/ptdump: take the memory hotplug lock inside ptdump_walk_pgd() Memory hot remove unmaps and te… https://t.co/ZuOQmldTub

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    4 Sept 2025

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Configurations

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References

Sources include official advisories and independent security research.