CVE-2025-38703 drm/xe: Make dma-fences compliant with the safe access rules
A use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel's Xe GPU driver allows attackers to execute arbitrary code or escalate privileges via improper memory management of DMA fences.
- 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-2025-38703?
CVE-2025-38703 is a high-severity use after free vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 4 Sep 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:
drm/xe: Make dma-fences compliant with the safe access rules
Xe can free some of the data pointed to by the dma-fences it exports. Most notably the timeline name can get freed if userspace closes the associated submit queue. At the same time the fence could have been exported to a third party (for example a sync_fence fd) which will then cause an use- after-free on subsequent access.
To make this safe we need to make the driver compliant with the newly documented dma-fence rules. Driver has to ensure a RCU grace period between signalling a fence and freeing any data pointed to by said fence.
For the timeline name we simply make the queue be freed via kfree_rcu and for the shared lock associated with multiple queues we add a RCU grace period before freeing the per GT structure holding the lock.
Weakness: CWE-416
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-38703?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2025-38703?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade to the fixed version. These bugs are found with fuzzing and sanitisers and avoided by memory-safe languages. More about Use after free.
Is CVE-2025-38703 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-38703 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-38703, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-38703, GHSA-q5gc-8mmj-m6hh, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2025-38703, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-12-CVE-2025-38703, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2025-38703 and 2 more.