CVE-2025-71233: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: PCI: endpoint: Avoid creating sub-groups asynchronously The asynchronous creation of sub-groups by a delayed work could lead to a NULL pointer dereference when the driver directory is removed before the work completes. The crash can be easily reproduced with the following commands: # cd /sys/kernel/config/pci_ep/functions/pci_epf_test # for i in {1..20}; do mkdir test && rmdir test; done BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000088 ... Call Trace: configfs_register_group+0x3d/0x190 pci_epf_cfs_work+0x41/0x110 process_one_work+0x18f/0x350 worker_thread+0x25a/0x3a0 Fix this issue by using configfs_add_default_group() API which does not have the deadlock problem as configfs_register_group() and does not require the delayed work handler. [mani: slightly reworded the description and added stable list]

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 5.12, before 5.15.201 (fixed in 5.15.201); from 5.16, before 6.1.164 (fixed in 6.1.164); from 6.2, before 6.6.127 (fixed in 6.6.127); from 6.7, before 6.12.72 (fixed in 6.12.72); from 6.13, before 6.18.11 (fixed in 6.18.11); from 6.19, before 6.19.1 (fixed in 6.19.1)

Published 2026-02-18. Last modified 2026-06-17.