CVE-2025-21644 - NULL Pointer Dereference

Severity

55%

Complexity

18%

Confidentiality

60%

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: drm/xe: Fix tlb invalidation when wedging If GuC fails to load, the driver wedges, but in the process it tries to do stuff that may not be initialized yet. This moves the xe_gt_tlb_invalidation_init() to be done earlier: as its own doc says, it's a software-only initialization and should had been named with the _early() suffix. Move it to be called by xe_gt_init_early(), so the locks and seqno are initialized, avoiding a NULL ptr deref when wedging: xe 0000:03:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* GT0: load failed: status: Reset = 0, BootROM = 0x50, UKernel = 0x00, MIA = 0x00, Auth = 0x01 xe 0000:03:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* GT0: firmware signature verification failed xe 0000:03:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* CRITICAL: Xe has declared device 0000:03:00.0 as wedged. ... BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000 #PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode #PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page PGD 0 P4D 0 Oops: Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP NOPTI CPU: 9 UID: 0 PID: 3908 Comm: modprobe Tainted: G U W 6.13.0-rc4-xe+ #3 Tainted: [U]=USER, [W]=WARN Hardware name: Intel Corporation Alder Lake Client Platform/AlderLake-S ADP-S DDR5 UDIMM CRB, BIOS ADLSFWI1.R00.3275.A00.2207010640 07/01/2022 RIP: 0010:xe_gt_tlb_invalidation_reset+0x75/0x110 [xe] This can be easily triggered by poking the GuC binary to force a signature failure. There will still be an extra message, xe 0000:03:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* GT0: GuC mmio request 0x4100: no reply 0x4100 but that's better than a NULL ptr deref. (cherry picked from commit 5001ef3af8f2c972d6fd9c5221a8457556f8bea6)

CVSS 3.1 Base Score 5.5. CVSS Attack Vector: local. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).

Demo Examples

NULL Pointer Dereference

CWE-476

While there are no complete fixes aside from conscientious programming, the following steps will go a long way to ensure that NULL pointer dereferences do not occur.


               
}
/* make use of pointer1 *//* ... */

If you are working with a multithreaded or otherwise asynchronous environment, ensure that proper locking APIs are used to lock before the if statement; and unlock when it has finished.

NULL Pointer Dereference

CWE-476

This example takes an IP address from a user, verifies that it is well formed and then looks up the hostname and copies it into a buffer.


               
}
strcpy(hostname, hp->h_name);/*routine that ensures user_supplied_addr is in the right format for conversion */

If an attacker provides an address that appears to be well-formed, but the address does not resolve to a hostname, then the call to gethostbyaddr() will return NULL. Since the code does not check the return value from gethostbyaddr (CWE-252), a NULL pointer dereference would then occur in the call to strcpy().

Note that this example is also vulnerable to a buffer overflow (see CWE-119).

NULL Pointer Dereference

CWE-476

In the following code, the programmer assumes that the system always has a property named "cmd" defined. If an attacker can control the program's environment so that "cmd" is not defined, the program throws a NULL pointer exception when it attempts to call the trim() method.


               
cmd = cmd.trim();

NULL Pointer Dereference

CWE-476

This application has registered to handle a URL when sent an intent:


               
}......
}
}
int length = URL.length();
...

The application assumes the URL will always be included in the intent. When the URL is not present, the call to getStringExtra() will return null, thus causing a null pointer exception when length() is called.

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