What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-38243: btrfs: fix invalid inode pointer dereferences during log replay

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: 2025-07-09 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: btrfs: fix invalid inode pointer dereferences during log replay In a few places where we call read_one_inode(), if we get a NULL pointer we end up jumping into an error path, or fallthrough in case of __add_inode_ref(), where we then do something like this: iput(&inode->vfs_inode); which results in an invalid inode pointer that triggers an invalid memory access, resulting in a crash. Fix this by making sure we don't do such dereferences.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 6.15 before 6.15.5; 6.16-rc1, 6.16-rc2, 6.16-rc3 — fixed in 6.15.5

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.15.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2dcf838cf5c2f0f4501edaa1680fcad03618d760
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/401d098f92ea69d8a75f8b845daf343e511681ba
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ba8386d662cc51cc5382688bbf7a152b0b0b27cf

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