Bug 2427124 (CVE-2025-68758)

Summary: CVE-2025-68758 kernel: backlight: led-bl: Add devlink to supplier LEDs
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
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Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
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A NULL pointer dereference vulnerability was found in the Linux kernel's LED backlight driver. The driver-device link (devlink) between the backlight consumer and LED supplier is incorrectly established with the parent device instead of the LED class device itself. This causes incorrect device removal ordering, where the LED driver can be unbound before the backlight driver, resulting in a NULL pointer dereference in led_put() during cleanup.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-01-05 10:02:55 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

backlight: led-bl: Add devlink to supplier LEDs

LED Backlight is a consumer of one or multiple LED class devices, but
devlink is currently unable to create correct supplier-producer links when
the supplier is a class device. It creates instead a link where the
supplier is the parent of the expected device.

One consequence is that removal order is not correctly enforced.

Issues happen for example with the following sections in a device tree
overlay:

    // An LED driver chip
    pca9632@62 {
        compatible = "nxp,pca9632";
        reg = <0x62>;

	// ...

        addon_led_pwm: led-pwm@3 {
            reg = <3>;
            label = "addon:led:pwm";
        };
    };

    backlight-addon {
        compatible = "led-backlight";
        leds = <&addon_led_pwm>;
        brightness-levels = <255>;
        default-brightness-level = <255>;
    };

In this example, the devlink should be created between the backlight-addon
(consumer) and the pca9632@62 (supplier). Instead it is created between the
backlight-addon (consumer) and the parent of the pca9632@62, which is
typically the I2C bus adapter.

On removal of the above overlay, the LED driver can be removed before the
backlight device, resulting in:

    Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 0000000000000010
    ...
    Call trace:
     led_put+0xe0/0x140
     devm_led_release+0x6c/0x98

Another way to reproduce the bug without any device tree overlays is
unbinding the LED class device (pca9632@62) before unbinding the consumer
(backlight-addon):

  echo 11-0062 >/sys/bus/i2c/drivers/leds-pca963x/unbind
  echo ...backlight-dock >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/led-backlight/unbind

Fix by adding a devlink between the consuming led-backlight device and the
supplying LED device, as other drivers and subsystems do as well.