CVE-2025-37865
Linux Kernel 5.18 – 6.1.135
Raw vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HCVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.
Summary
CVE-2025-37865 is a medium-severity Use of Uninitialized Resource (CWE-908) vulnerability in Linux Linux Kernel. Its CVSS base score is 5.5 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique OS Credential Dumping (T1003); ranked at the 18th 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-15 (Development Process, Standards, and Tools) — see the control section below for these in your framework.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2025-14125
Vulnerability Data
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: dsa: mv88e6xxx: fix -ENOENT when deleting VLANs and MST is unsupported Russell King reports that on the ZII dev rev B, deleting a bridge VLAN from a user port…
more
fails with -ENOENT: https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/Z_lQXNP0s5-IiJzd@shell.armlinux.org.uk/ This comes from mv88e6xxx_port_vlan_leave() -> mv88e6xxx_mst_put(), which tries to find an MST entry in &chip->msts associated with the SID, but fails and returns -ENOENT as such. But we know that this chip does not support MST at all, so that is not surprising. The question is why does the guard in mv88e6xxx_mst_put() not exit early: if (!sid) return 0; And the answer seems to be simple: the sid comes from vlan.sid which supposedly was previously populated by mv88e6xxx_vtu_get(). But some chip->info->ops->vtu_getnext() implementations do not populate vlan.sid, for example see mv88e6185_g1_vtu_getnext(). In that case, later in mv88e6xxx_port_vlan_leave() we are using a garbage sid which is just residual stack memory. Testing for sid == 0 covers all cases of a non-bridge VLAN or a bridge VLAN mapped to the default MSTI. For some chips, SID 0 is valid and installed by mv88e6xxx_stu_setup(). A chip which does not support the STU would implicitly only support mapping all VLANs to the default MSTI, so although SID 0 is not valid, it would be sufficient, if we were to zero-initialize the vlan structure, to fix the bug, due to the coincidence that a test for vlan.sid == 0 already exists and leads to the same (correct) behavior. Another option which would be sufficient would be to add a test for mv88e6xxx_has_stu() inside mv88e6xxx_mst_put(), symmetric to the one which already exists in mv88e6xxx_mst_get(). But that placement means the caller will have to dereference vlan.sid, which means it will access uninitialized memory, which is not nice even if it ignores it later. So we end up making both modifications, in order to not rely just on the sid == 0 coincidence, but also to avoid having uninitialized structure fields which might get temporarily accessed.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Developer testing and evaluation (including static analysis) can find uses of uninitialized resources after they are coded.
Requiring documented development standards and tools can mandate initialization checks and safe patterns that stop the weakness from being introduced.
Engineering principles can require explicit resource initialization before use, structurally avoiding uninitialized access.
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.
Secure SDLC activities such as static analysis and code review directly prevent use of uninitialized resources while also addressing many other weaknesses.
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.
Security testing in development and acceptance can detect uninitialized resource usage through dynamic analysis and fuzzing.
Secure development life cycle mandates initialization checks and static analysis that can catch uninitialized resource use.
Application security requirements can specify mandatory initialization of variables and resources before use.
Secure system architecture and engineering principles include defensive coding practices that prevent use of uninitialized memory or objects.
Secure coding standards directly require explicit initialization of all variables and resources, substantially mitigating CWE-908.