CVE-2025-38516: debian debian_linux NULL Pointer Dereference

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-38516 is a medium (CVSS 5.5) NULL Pointer Dereference vulnerability in debian debian_linux. EPSS estimates a 0.17% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 6% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 16-08-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 11-05-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: pinctrl: qcom: msm: mark certain pins as invalid for interrupts On some platforms, the UFS-reset pin has no interrupt logic in TLMM but is nevertheless registered as a GPIO in the kernel. This enables the user-space to trigger a BUG() in the pinctrl-msm driver by running, for example: `gpiomon -c 0 113` on RB2. The exact culprit is requesting pins whose intr_detection_width setting is not 1 or 2 for interrupts. This hits a BUG() in msm_gpio_irq_set_type(). Potentially crashing the kernel due to an invalid request from user-space is not optimal, so let's go through the pins and mark those that would fail the check as invalid for the irq chip as we should not even register them as available irqs. This function can be extended if we determine that there are more corner-cases like this.

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