CVE-2025-21920: vlan: enforce underlying device type

Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2025-04-01 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-125

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: vlan: enforce underlying device type Currently, VLAN devices can be created on top of non-ethernet devices. Besides the fact that it doesn't make much sense, this also causes a bug which leaks the address of a kernel function to usermode. When creating a VLAN device, we initialize GARP (garp_init_applicant) and MRP (mrp_init_applicant) for the underlying device. As part of the initialization process, we add the multicast address of each applicant to the underlying device, by calling dev_mc_add. __dev_mc_add uses dev->addr_len to determine the length of the new multicast address. This causes an out-of-bounds read if dev->addr_len is greater than 6, since the multicast addresses provided by GARP and MRP are only 6 bytes long. This behaviour can be reproduced using the following commands: ip tunnel add gretest mode ip6gre local ::1 remote ::2 dev lo ip l set up dev gretest ip link add link gretest name vlantest type vlan id 100 Then, the following command will display the address of garp_pdu_rcv: ip maddr show | grep 01:80:c2:00:00:21 Fix the bug by enforcing the type of the underlying device during VLAN device initialization.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 2.6.35 before 5.4.291; from 5.5 before 5.10.235; from 5.11 before 5.15.179; from 5.16 before 6.1.131; from 6.2 before 6.6.83; from 6.7 before 6.12.19 — fixed in 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 5.4.291, 6.1.131, 6.12.19, 6.13.7

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 5.4.291, 6.1.131. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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