Bug 2396947 (CVE-2025-39838)

Summary: CVE-2025-39838 kernel: cifs: prevent NULL pointer dereference in UTF16 conversion
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: ---
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-09-19 16:03:33 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

cifs: prevent NULL pointer dereference in UTF16 conversion

There can be a NULL pointer dereference bug here. NULL is passed to
__cifs_sfu_make_node without checks, which passes it unchecked to
cifs_strndup_to_utf16, which in turn passes it to
cifs_local_to_utf16_bytes where '*from' is dereferenced, causing a crash.

This patch adds a check for NULL 'src' in cifs_strndup_to_utf16 and
returns NULL early to prevent dereferencing NULL pointer.

Found by Linux Verification Center (linuxtesting.org) with SVACE
Comment 1 Jon Moroney 2025-09-19 16:19:59 UTC 
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025091902-CVE-2025-39838-2a5d@gregkh/T