CVE-2026-81005 ipmi: si: Fix NULL pointer dereference after failed registration

What is CVE-2026-81005?

CVE-2026-81005 is a vulnerability in Linux, published on 11 Sep 2026. 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:

ipmi: si: Fix NULL pointer dereference after failed registration

try_smi_init() allocates new_smi->si_sm and later calls ipmi_register_smi_mod(), which maps to ipmi_add_smi().

During ipmi_add_smi(), the upper IPMI message handler obtains the initial BMC device information through __bmc_get_device_id(). This can fail if the BMC does not return a successful response to the Get Device ID command.

When the BMC returns a nonzero completion code, the device-id helper retries the command and eventually returns -EIO if the device ID still cannot be fetched.

On this failure path, ipmi_add_smi() logs "Unable to get the device id" and goes to out_err_started, where it invokes the lower driver's shutdown callback. try_smi_init() then logs the returned registration failure:

ipmi_si IPI0001:00: IPMI message handler: Unable to get the device id: -5 ipmi_si IPI0001:00: Unable to register device: error -5

For ipmi_si, the shutdown callback is shutdown_smi(), which cleans up the SI state machine data, frees smi_info->si_sm, and sets smi_info->si_sm and smi_info->intf to NULL.

However, intf->in_shutdown is not set on this failed-registration rollback path. Therefore, the asynchronous redo_bmc_reg work item can still retry BMC device-id probing after the lower driver has already cleared its SI state machine data. In the observed case, that retry path reached start_next_msg(), which passed the NULL smi_info->si_sm pointer to the selected KCS state machine handler:

BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000000000000000 Workqueue: events redo_bmc_reg [ipmi_msghandler] RIP: start_kcs_transaction+0x2c/0x190 [ipmi_si] Call Trace: start_next_msg+0x50/0x80 [ipmi_si] check_start_timer_thread.part.9+0x3b/0x50 [ipmi_si] sender+0x69/0x80 [ipmi_si] i_ipmi_request+0x2ac/0x9d0 [ipmi_msghandler] __get_device_id.isra.29+0xaa/0x180 [ipmi_msghandler] __bmc_get_device_id+0xef/0x950 [ipmi_msghandler] redo_bmc_reg+0x52/0x60 [ipmi_msghandler] process_one_work+0x1a7/0x360

Set intf->in_shutdown on the out_err_started path before invoking the lower driver's shutdown callback. This prevents later redo_bmc_reg retries from using an interface whose lower driver state has been cleaned up, and applies the same shutdown state to other IPMI interfaces as well.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-81005?

How do I fix CVE-2026-81005?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2026-81005 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-81005 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

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

Also known as AZL-100268, BELL-CVE-2026-81005, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-81005, GHSA-36x4-6h38-8grw, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-81005.