CVE-2025-39684: 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: comedi: Fix use of uninitialized memory in do_insn_ioctl() and do_insnlist_ioctl() syzbot reports a KMSAN kernel-infoleak in `do_insn_ioctl()`. A kernel buffer is allocated to hold `insn->n` samples (each of which is an `unsigned int`). For some instruction types, `insn->n` samples are copied back to user-space, unless an error code is being returned. The problem is that not all the instruction handlers that need to return data to userspace fill in the whole `insn->n` samples, so that there is an information leak. There is a similar syzbot report for `do_insnlist_ioctl()`, although it does not have a reproducer for it at the time of writing. One culprit is `insn_rw_emulate_bits()` which is used as the handler for `INSN_READ` or `INSN_WRITE` instructions for subdevices that do not have a specific handler for that instruction, but do have an `INSN_BITS` handler. For `INSN_READ` it only fills in at most 1 sample, so if `insn->n` is greater than 1, the remaining `insn->n - 1` samples copied to userspace will be uninitialized kernel data. Another culprit is `vm80xx_ai_insn_read()` in the "vm80xx" driver. It never returns an error, even if it fails to fill the buffer. Fix it in `do_insn_ioctl()` and `do_insnlist_ioctl()` by making sure that uninitialized parts of the allocated buffer are zeroed before handling each instruction. Thanks to Arnaud Lecomte for their fix to `do_insn_ioctl()`. That fix replaced the call to `kmalloc_array()` with `kcalloc()`, but it is not always necessary to clear the whole buffer.

Affected products

  • Debian Debian Linux: version 11.0 only
  • Linux Linux Kernel: from 2.6.29, 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 6.12.44 (fixed in 6.12.44); from 6.13, before 6.16.4 (fixed in 6.16.4); version 6.17 only

Published 2025-09-05. Last modified 2026-06-17.