CVE-2025-68181 drm/radeon: Remove calls to drm_put_dev()
A use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel's radeon driver can cause a system crash during device probe failures or removal.
- 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-2025-68181?
CVE-2025-68181 is a high-severity use after free vulnerability in Linux, published on 16 Dec 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/radeon: Remove calls to drm_put_dev()
Since the allocation of the drivers main structure was changed to devm_drm_dev_alloc() drm_put_dev()'ing to trigger it to be free'd should be done by devres.
However, drm_put_dev() is still in the probe error and device remove paths. When the driver fails to probe warnings like the following are shown because devres is trying to drm_put_dev() after the driver already did it.
[ 5.642230] radeon 0000:01:05.0: probe with driver radeon failed with error -22 [ 5.649605] ------------[ cut here ]------------ [ 5.649607] refcount_t: underflow; use-after-free. [ 5.649620] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 357 at lib/refcount.c:28 refcount_warn_saturate+0xbe/0x110
(cherry picked from commit 3eb8c0b4c091da0a623ade0d3ee7aa4a93df1ea4)
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-68181?
How do I fix CVE-2025-68181?
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-2025-68181 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-68181 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2025-68181, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-68181, GHSA-5r23-9p29-3j75, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-68181.