CVE-2025-21959
Linux Kernel vulnerability analysis and mitigation

Overview

CVE-2025-21959 is a vulnerability discovered in the Linux kernel affecting the netfilter subsystem, specifically in the nfconncount component. The issue was disclosed on April 1, 2025, and involves uninitialized struct members in the inserttree() function. The vulnerability affects multiple versions of the Linux kernel, including versions from 4.14.92 through 6.14-rc6 (NVD).

Technical details

The vulnerability stems from incomplete initialization of struct nfconncounttuple in the inserttree() function. Specifically, the 'cpu' and 'jiffies32' members were introduced by commit b36e4523d4d5 but were not properly initialized in the counttree() function. This was later split into inserttree() through commit 34848d5c896e. The issue manifests as an uninitialized value usage detected by KMSAN in the findor_evict function. The vulnerability has been assigned a CVSS v3.1 base score of 5.5 (Medium) with the vector string CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H (NVD).

Impact

The vulnerability can lead to a denial of service condition in the Linux kernel. The CVSS scoring indicates that while the vulnerability requires local access and low privileges, it can result in high availability impact to the affected system (NVD).

Mitigation and workarounds

The vulnerability has been fixed in multiple Linux kernel versions, including version 6.1.133-1 for Debian's stable distribution (bookworm). System administrators are recommended to upgrade their Linux kernel packages to the patched versions (Debian Security).

Additional resources


SourceThis report was generated using AI

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