CVE-2025-22128 wifi: ath12k: Clear affinity hint before calling ath12k_pci_free_irq() in error path
A missing cleanup in the ath12k WiFi driver error path triggers a kernel warning, potentially causing instability or denial of service.
- 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-2025-22128?
CVE-2025-22128 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 16 Apr 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:
wifi: ath12k: Clear affinity hint before calling ath12k_pci_free_irq() in error path
If a shared IRQ is used by the driver due to platform limitation, then the IRQ affinity hint is set right after the allocation of IRQ vectors in ath12k_pci_msi_alloc(). This does no harm unless one of the functions requesting the IRQ fails and attempt to free the IRQ.
This may end up with a warning from the IRQ core that is expecting the affinity hint to be cleared before freeing the IRQ:
kernel/irq/manage.c:
/* make sure affinity_hint is cleaned up */ if (WARN_ON_ONCE(desc->affinity_hint)) desc->affinity_hint = NULL;
So to fix this issue, clear the IRQ affinity hint before calling ath12k_pci_free_irq() in the error path. The affinity will be cleared once again further down the error path due to code organization, but that does no harm.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-22128?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2025-22128?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2025-22128 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-22128 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-22128, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-22128, GHSA-2w3p-68xj-4hh5, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2025-22128, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-22128.