CVE-2025-38721: 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: netfilter: ctnetlink: fix refcount leak on table dump There is a reference count leak in ctnetlink_dump_table(): if (res < 0) { nf_conntrack_get(&ct->ct_general); // HERE cb->args[1] = (unsigned long)ct; ... While its very unlikely, its possible that ct == last. If this happens, then the refcount of ct was already incremented. This 2nd increment is never undone. This prevents the conntrack object from being released, which in turn keeps prevents cnet->count from dropping back to 0. This will then block the netns dismantle (or conntrack rmmod) as nf_conntrack_cleanup_net_list() will wait forever. This can be reproduced by running conntrack_resize.sh selftest in a loop. It takes ~20 minutes for me on a preemptible kernel on average before I see a runaway kworker spinning in nf_conntrack_cleanup_net_list. One fix would to change this to: if (res < 0) { if (ct != last) nf_conntrack_get(&ct->ct_general); But this reference counting isn't needed in the first place. We can just store a cookie value instead. A followup patch will do the same for ctnetlink_exp_dump_table, it looks to me as if this has the same problem and like ctnetlink_dump_table, we only need a 'skip hint', not the actual object so we can apply the same cookie strategy there as well.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 11.0 only
• Linux Linux Kernel: from 2.6.19, before 5.4.297 (fixed in 5.4.297); from 5.5, before 5.10.241 (fixed in 5.10.241); from 5.11, before 5.15.190 (fixed in 5.15.190); from 5.16, before 6.1.149 (fixed in 6.1.149); from 6.2, before 6.6.103 (fixed in 6.6.103); from 6.7, before 6.12.43 (fixed in 6.12.43); …

Published 2025-09-04. Last modified 2026-07-14.