CVE-2025-71152

Technical Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: dsa: properly keep track of conduit reference

Problem description

-------------------

DSA has a mumbo-jumbo of reference handling of the conduit net device

and its kobject which, sadly, is just wrong and doesn't make sense.

There are two distinct problems.

1. The OF path, which uses of_find_net_device_by_node(), never releases

the elevated refcount on the conduit's kobject. Nominally, the OF and

non-OF paths should result in objects having identical reference

counts taken, and it is already suspicious that

dsa_dev_to_net_device() has a put_device() call which is missing in

dsa_port_parse_of(), but we can actually even verify that an issue

exists. With CONFIG_DEBUG_KOBJECT_RELEASE=y, if we run this command

"before" and "after" applying this patch:

(unbind the conduit driver for net device eno2)

echo 0000:00:00.2 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/fsl_enetc/unbind

we see these lines in the output dif

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References