CVE-2025-38337: Debian Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: jbd2: fix data-race and null-ptr-deref in jbd2_journal_dirty_metadata() Since handle->h_transaction may be a NULL pointer, so we should change it to call is_handle_aborted(handle) first before dereferencing it. And the following data-race was reported in my fuzzer: ================================================================== BUG: KCSAN: data-race in jbd2_journal_dirty_metadata / jbd2_journal_dirty_metadata write to 0xffff888011024104 of 4 bytes by task 10881 on cpu 1: jbd2_journal_dirty_metadata+0x2a5/0x770 fs/jbd2/transaction.c:1556 __ext4_handle_dirty_metadata+0xe7/0x4b0 fs/ext4/ext4_jbd2.c:358 ext4_do_update_inode fs/ext4/inode.c:5220 [inline] ext4_mark_iloc_dirty+0x32c/0xd50 fs/ext4/inode.c:5869 __ext4_mark_inode_dirty+0xe1/0x450 fs/ext4/inode.c:6074 ext4_dirty_inode+0x98/0xc0 fs/ext4/inode.c:6103 .... read to 0xffff888011024104 of 4 bytes by task 10880 on cpu 0: jbd2_journal_dirty_metadata+0xf2/0x770 fs/jbd2/transaction.c:1512 __ext4_handle_dirty_metadata+0xe7/0x4b0 fs/ext4/ext4_jbd2.c:358 ext4_do_update_inode fs/ext4/inode.c:5220 [inline] ext4_mark_iloc_dirty+0x32c/0xd50 fs/ext4/inode.c:5869 __ext4_mark_inode_dirty+0xe1/0x450 fs/ext4/inode.c:6074 ext4_dirty_inode+0x98/0xc0 fs/ext4/inode.c:6103 .... value changed: 0x00000000 -> 0x00000001 ================================================================== This issue is caused by missing data-race annotation for jh->b_modified. Therefore, the missing annotation needs to be added.

Affected products

  • Debian Debian Linux: version 11.0 only
  • Linux Linux Kernel: from 4.3, before 5.4.295 (fixed in 5.4.295); from 5.5, before 5.10.239 (fixed in 5.10.239); from 5.11, before 5.15.186 (fixed in 5.15.186); from 5.16, before 6.1.142 (fixed in 6.1.142); from 6.2, before 6.6.95 (fixed in 6.6.95); from 6.7, before 6.12.35 (fixed in 6.12.35); …

Published 2025-07-10. Last modified 2026-06-17.