CVE-2025-38350

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

net/sched: Always pass notifications when child class becomes empty

Certain classful qdiscs may invoke their classes dequeue handler on an enqueue operation. This may unexpectedly empty the child qdisc and thus make an in-flight class passive via qlen_notify(). Most qdiscs do not expect such behaviour at this point in time and may re-activate the class eventually anyways which will lead to a use-after-free.

The referenced fix commit attempted to fix this behavior for the HFSC case by moving the backlog accounting around, though this turned out to be incomplete since the parents parent may run into the issue too. The following reproducer demonstrates this use-after-free:

tc qdisc add dev lo root handle 1: drr
tc filter add dev lo parent 1: basic classid 1:1
tc class add dev lo parent 1: classid 1:1 drr
tc qdisc add dev lo parent 1:1 handle 2: hfsc def 1
tc class add dev lo parent 2: classid 2:1 hfsc rt m1 8 d 1 m2 0
tc qdisc add dev lo parent 2:1 handle 3: netem
tc qdisc add dev lo parent 3:1 handle 4: blackhole

echo 1 | socat -u STDIN UDP4-DATAGRAM:127.0.0.1:8888
tc class delete dev lo classid 1:1
echo 1 | socat -u STDIN UDP4-DATAGRAM:127.0.0.1:8888

Since backlog accounting issues leading to a use-after-frees on stale class pointers is a recurring pattern at this point, this patch takes a different approach. Instead of trying to fix the accounting, the patch ensures that qdisc_tree_reduce_backlog always calls qlen_notify when the child qdisc is empty. This solves the problem because deletion of qdiscs always involves a call to qdisc_reset() and / or qdisc_purge_queue() which ultimately resets its qlen to 0 thus causing the following qdisc_tree_reduce_backlog() to report to the parent. Note that this may call qlen_notify on passive classes multiple times. This is not a problem after the recent patch series that made all the classful qdiscs qlen_notify() handlers idempotent.

Weakness

The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory “belongs” to the code that operates on the new pointer.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/103406b38c600fec1fe375a77b27d87e314aea09
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/3b290923ad2b23596208c1e29520badef4356a43
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7874c9c132e906a52a187d045995b115973c93fb
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a44acdd9e84a211989ff4b9b92bf3545d8456ad5
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a553afd91f55ff39b1e8a1c4989a29394c9e0472
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e269f29e9395527bc00c213c6b15da04ebb35070
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e9921b57dca05ac5f4fa1fa8e993d4f0ee52e2b7
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f680a4643c6f71e758d8fe0431a958e9a6a4f59d
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/10/msg00007.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/10/msg00008.html