CVE-2023-53658: linux NULL Pointer Dereference

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2023-53658 is a medium (CVSS 5.5) NULL Pointer Dereference vulnerability in linux. EPSS estimates a 0.15% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 3.9% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 07-10-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 11-05-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: spi: bcm-qspi: return error if neither hif_mspi nor mspi is available If neither a "hif_mspi" nor "mspi" resource is present, the driver will just early exit in probe but still return success. Apart from not doing anything meaningful, this would then also lead to a null pointer access on removal, as platform_get_drvdata() would return NULL, which it would then try to dereference when trying to unregister the spi master. Fix this by unconditionally calling devm_ioremap_resource(), as it can handle a NULL res and will then return a viable ERR_PTR() if we get one. The "return 0;" was previously a "goto qspi_resource_err;" where then ret was returned, but since ret was still initialized to 0 at this place this was a valid conversion in 63c5395bb7a9 ("spi: bcm-qspi: Fix use-after-free on unbind"). The issue was not introduced by this commit, only made more obvious.

• CWE-476NULL Pointer DereferenceThe product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.