CVE-2025-38121 wifi: iwlwifi: mld: avoid panic on init failure

What is CVE-2025-38121?

CVE-2025-38121 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 3 Jul 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: iwlwifi: mld: avoid panic on init failure

In case of an error during init, in_hw_restart will be set, but it will never get cleared. Instead, we will retry to init again, and then we will act like we are in a restart when we are actually not.

This causes (among others) to a NULL pointer dereference when canceling rx_omi::finished_work, that was not even initialized, because we thought that we are in hw_restart.

Set in_hw_restart to true only if the fw is running, then we know that FW was loaded successfully and we are not going to the retry loop.

Weakness: CWE-476

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-38121?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2025-38121?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2025-38121 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38121 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-38121, GHSA-2prg-gcgc-mm7v, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38121.