CVE-2025-38420 wifi: carl9170: do not ping device which has failed to load firmware
A null pointer dereference in the carl9170 WiFi driver causes a kernel crash when pinging a device with failed firmware loading.
- 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-2025-38420?
CVE-2025-38420 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 25 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: carl9170: do not ping device which has failed to load firmware
Syzkaller reports [1, 2] crashes caused by an attempts to ping the device which has failed to load firmware. Since such a device doesn't pass 'ieee80211_register_hw()', an internal workqueue managed by 'ieee80211_queue_work()' is not yet created and an attempt to queue work on it causes null-ptr-deref.
[1] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=9a4aec827829942045ff [2] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=0d8afba53e8fb2633217
Weakness: CWE-476
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-38420?
It affects 2 products.
Products include Debian Debian Linux, Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2025-38420?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2025-38420 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38420 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-38420, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-38420, GHSA-8249-rqx5-qf75, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2025-38420, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-12-CVE-2025-38420, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2025-38420 and 2 more.