CVE-2025-38420: 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: wifi: carl9170: do not ping device which has failed to load firmware Syzkaller reports [1, 2] crashes caused by an attempts to ping the device which has failed to load firmware. Since such a device doesn't pass 'ieee80211_register_hw()', an internal workqueue managed by 'ieee80211_queue_work()' is not yet created and an attempt to queue work on it causes null-ptr-deref. [1] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=9a4aec827829942045ff [2] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=0d8afba53e8fb2633217

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 11.0 only
• Linux Linux Kernel: from 2.6.38, 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 2025-07-25. Last modified 2026-06-17.