Cyber Resilience

CVE-2025-37864

Linux Kernel 5.18 – 6.6.88

Published
09 May 2025
Modified
17 June 2026
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 5.5
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0028 20th percentile
Risk Priority 42 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2025-37864 is a medium-severity Reachable Assertion (CWE-617) vulnerability in Linux Linux Kernel. Its CVSS base score is 5.5 (Medium).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked at the 20th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to SA-11 (Developer Testing and Evaluation) and SA-8 (Security and Privacy Engineering Principles) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: dsa: clean up FDB, MDB, VLAN entries on unbind As explained in many places such as commit b117e1e8a86d ("net: dsa: delete dsa_legacy_fdb_add and dsa_legacy_fdb_del"), DSA is written given the…

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assumption that higher layers have balanced additions/deletions. As such, it only makes sense to be extremely vocal when those assumptions are violated and the driver unbinds with entries still present. But Ido Schimmel points out a very simple situation where that is wrong: https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/ZDazSM5UsPPjQuKr@shredder/ (also briefly discussed by me in the aforementioned commit). Basically, while the bridge bypass operations are not something that DSA explicitly documents, and for the majority of DSA drivers this API simply causes them to go to promiscuous mode, that isn't the case for all drivers. Some have the necessary requirements for bridge bypass operations to do something useful - see dsa_switch_supports_uc_filtering(). Although in tools/testing/selftests/net/forwarding/local_termination.sh, we made an effort to popularize better mechanisms to manage address filters on DSA interfaces from user space - namely macvlan for unicast, and setsockopt(IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP) - through mtools - for multicast, the fact is that 'bridge fdb add ... self static local' also exists as kernel UAPI, and might be useful to someone, even if only for a quick hack. It seems counter-productive to block that path by implementing shim .ndo_fdb_add and .ndo_fdb_del operations which just return -EOPNOTSUPP in order to prevent the ndo_dflt_fdb_add() and ndo_dflt_fdb_del() from running, although we could do that. Accepting that cleanup is necessary seems to be the only option. Especially since we appear to be coming back at this from a different angle as well. Russell King is noticing that the WARN_ON() triggers even for VLANs: https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/Z_li8Bj8bD4-BYKQ@shell.armlinux.org.uk/ What happens in the bug report above is that dsa_port_do_vlan_del() fails, then the VLAN entry lingers on, and then we warn on unbind and leak it. This is not a straight revert of the blamed commit, but we now add an informational print to the kernel log (to still have a way to see that bugs exist), and some extra comments gathered from past years' experience, to justify the logic.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1499.004 Application or System Exploitation Impact
Adversaries may exploit software vulnerabilities that can cause an application or system to crash and deny availability to users.
T1499 Endpoint Denial of Service Impact
Adversaries may perform Endpoint Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to degrade or block the availability of services to users.
Derived from this CVE’s CWE(s) via the direct CWE→ATT&CK cross-walk.

CVEs Like This One

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CVE-2026-46287Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2023-52831Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2024-42252Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2024-35957Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2023-53450Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2026-53285Same product: Linux Linux Kernel

Affected Assets

linux
linux kernel
6.15 · 5.18 — 6.6.88 · 6.7 — 6.12.25 · 6.13 — 6.14.4

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

Developer testing and evaluation finds reachable assertions during development.

Security engineering principles discourage use of assertions for handling untrusted input.

Validating untrusted inputs structurally prevents attacker data from reaching and triggering assertions.

Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

PR.PS-06 mostly match
prevents

Secure SDLC practices directly prevent unsafe assertions from being coded in reachable paths.

DE.CM-09 partial match
prevents

Runtime monitoring of software can detect assertion-triggered crashes as adverse events.

ID.RA-01 partial match
prevents

Vulnerability identification processes can discover and record reachable-assertion flaws before deployment.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

finds

Security testing in development can detect reachable assertions before release, reducing the likelihood of exploitation.

prevents

Secure development lifecycle mandates defensive coding and input validation that prevent reachable assertions from being triggered by untrusted data.

prevents

Application security requirements can specify that assertions must not be reachable from attacker-controlled inputs.

prevents

Secure architecture principles discourage the use of assertions for runtime error handling that an attacker could exploit.

prevents

Secure coding standards explicitly ban the use of assert() or equivalent statements that can be triggered by external input.

References