CVE-2023-54065 net: dsa: realtek: fix out-of-bounds access
Out-of-bounds memory access in the Realtek DSA driver can lead to memory corruption, potentially enabling code execution or system crashes.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-54065?
CVE-2023-54065 is a high-severity memory corruption vulnerability in Linux, published on 24 Dec 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: dsa: realtek: fix out-of-bounds access
The probe function sets priv->chip_data to (void *)priv + sizeof(*priv) with the expectation that priv has enough trailing space.
However, only realtek-smi actually allocated this chip_data space. Do likewise in realtek-mdio to fix out-of-bounds accesses.
These accesses likely went unnoticed so far, because of an (unused) buf[4096] member in struct realtek_priv, which caused kmalloc to round up the allocated buffer to a big enough size, so nothing of value was overwritten. With a different allocator (like in the barebox bootloader port of the driver) or with KASAN, the memory corruption becomes quickly apparent.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-54065?
How do I fix CVE-2023-54065?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.
Is CVE-2023-54065 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-54065 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2023-54065, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-54065, GHSA-gwcx-q2c7-j3r5, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-54065.