Bug 2378987 (CVE-2025-38262)

Summary:	CVE-2025-38262 kernel: tty: serial: uartlite: register uart driver in init
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	Keywords:	Security
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-07-09 11:01:56 UTC

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

tty: serial: uartlite: register uart driver in init

When two instances of uart devices are probing, a concurrency race can
occur. If one thread calls uart_register_driver function, which first
allocates and assigns memory to 'uart_state' member of uart_driver
structure, the other instance can bypass uart driver registration and
call ulite_assign. This calls uart_add_one_port, which expects the uart
driver to be fully initialized. This leads to a kernel panic due to a
null pointer dereference:

[    8.143581] BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 00000000000002b8
[    8.156982] #PF: supervisor write access in kernel mode
[    8.156984] #PF: error_code(0x0002) - not-present page
[    8.156986] PGD 0 P4D 0
...
[    8.180668] RIP: 0010:mutex_lock+0x19/0x30
[    8.188624] Call Trace:
[    8.188629]  ? __die_body.cold+0x1a/0x1f
[    8.195260]  ? page_fault_oops+0x15c/0x290
[    8.209183]  ? __irq_resolve_mapping+0x47/0x80
[    8.209187]  ? exc_page_fault+0x64/0x140
[    8.209190]  ? asm_exc_page_fault+0x22/0x30
[    8.209196]  ? mutex_lock+0x19/0x30
[    8.223116]  uart_add_one_port+0x60/0x440
[    8.223122]  ? proc_tty_register_driver+0x43/0x50
[    8.223126]  ? tty_register_driver+0x1ca/0x1e0
[    8.246250]  ulite_probe+0x357/0x4b0 [uartlite]

To prevent it, move uart driver registration in to init function. This
will ensure that uart_driver is always registered when probe function
is called.

Comment 1 Jon Moroney 2025-07-09 17:44:34 UTC

Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025070936-CVE-2025-38262-419f@gregkh/T