What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2025-39684: comedi: Fix use of uninitialized memory in do_insn_ioctl() and do_insnlist_ioctl()
- 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: 2025-09-05 · updated 2026-10-19
- Weakness: CWE-908
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: comedi: Fix use of uninitialized memory in do_insn_ioctl() and do_insnlist_ioctl() syzbot reports a KMSAN kernel-infoleak in `do_insn_ioctl()`. A kernel buffer is allocated to hold `insn->n` samples (each of which is an `unsigned int`). For some instruction types, `insn->n` samples are copied back to user-space, unless an error code is being returned. The problem is that not all the instruction handlers that need to return data to userspace fill in the whole `insn->n` samples, so that there is an information leak. There is a similar syzbot report for `do_insnlist_ioctl()`, although it does not have a reproducer for it at the time of writing. One culprit is `insn_rw_emulate_bits()` which is used as the handler for `INSN_READ` or `INSN_WRITE` instructions for subdevices that do not have a specific handler for that instruction, but do have an `INSN_BITS` handler. For `INSN_READ` it only fills in at most 1 sample, so if `insn->n` is greater than 1, the remaining `insn->n - 1` samples copied to userspace will be uninitialized kernel data. Another culprit is `vm80xx_ai_insn_read()` in the "vm80xx" driver. It never returns an error, even if it fails to fill the buffer. Fix it in `do_insn_ioctl()` and `do_insnlist_ioctl()` by making sure that uninitialized parts of the allocated buffer are zeroed before handling each instruction. Thanks to Arnaud Lecomte for their fix to `do_insn_ioctl()`. That fix replaced the call to `kmalloc_array()` with `kcalloc()`, but it is not always necessary to clear the whole buffer.
Affected products
- Debian Linux: 11.0
- Linux kernel: from 2.6.29 before 5.15.190; from 5.16 before 6.1.149; from 6.2 before 6.6.103; from 6.7 before 6.12.44; from 6.13 before 6.16.4; 6.17-rc1, 6.17-rc2 — fixed in 5.15.190, 6.1.149, 6.12.44, 6.16.4, 6.6.103
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.15.190, 6.1.149, 6.12.44, 6.16.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3cd212e895ca2d58963fdc6422502b10dd3966bb
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/868a1b68dcd9f2805bb86aa64862402f785d8c4a
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/aecf0d557ddd95ce68193a5ee1dc4c87415ff08a
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d84f6e77ebe3359394df32ecd97e0d76a25283dc
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f3b0c9ec54736f3b8118f93a473d22e11ee65743
- https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ff4a7c18799c7fe999fa56c5cf276e13866b8c1a
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/10/msg00008.html
- https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/html/ssa-032379.html
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