CVE-2025-38516 pinctrl: qcom: msm: mark certain pins as invalid for interrupts
Local users can crash the Linux kernel by requesting interrupts on specific Qualcomm pins lacking interrupt logic, causing a BUG() in the pinctrl driver.
- 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-2025-38516?
CVE-2025-38516 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 16 Aug 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:
pinctrl: qcom: msm: mark certain pins as invalid for interrupts
On some platforms, the UFS-reset pin has no interrupt logic in TLMM but is nevertheless registered as a GPIO in the kernel. This enables the user-space to trigger a BUG() in the pinctrl-msm driver by running, for example: `gpiomon -c 0 113` on RB2.
The exact culprit is requesting pins whose intr_detection_width setting is not 1 or 2 for interrupts. This hits a BUG() in msm_gpio_irq_set_type(). Potentially crashing the kernel due to an invalid request from user-space is not optimal, so let's go through the pins and mark those that would fail the check as invalid for the irq chip as we should not even register them as available irqs.
This function can be extended if we determine that there are more corner-cases like this.
Weakness: CWE-476
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-38516?
It affects 2 products.
Products include Debian Debian Linux, Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2025-38516?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2025-38516 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38516 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux
Sources
Also known as AZL-66405, AZL-73548, BELL-CVE-2025-38516, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-38516, GHSA-3f8h-fgg5-j8hm, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2025-38516 and 4 more.