Vulnerability in Kernel (CVE-2025-21910)

Summary

Vulnerability in Kernel (CVE-2025-21910). Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure. Mitigation: upgrade to 5.4.291, 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 6.1.131, 6.6.83, 6.12.19, 6.13.7 or later.

Original description

The description as published by the source.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: cfg80211: regulatory: improve invalid hints checking

Syzbot keeps reporting an issue [1] that occurs when erroneous symbols
sent from userspace get through into user_alpha2[] via
regulatory_hint_user() call. Such invalid regulatory hints should be
rejected.

While a sanity check from commit 47caf685a685 ("cfg80211: regulatory:
reject invalid hints") looks to be enough to deter these very cases,
there is a way to get around it due to 2 reasons.

The way isalpha() works, symbols other than latin lower and
upper letters may be used to determine a country/domain.
For instance, greek letters will also be considered upper/lower
letters and for such characters isalpha() will return true as well.
However, ISO-3166-1 alpha2 codes should only hold latin
characters.
While processing a user regulatory request, between
reg_process_hint_user() and regulatory_hint_user() there happens to
be a call to queue_regulatory_request() which modifies letters in
request->alpha2[] with toupper(). This works fine for latin symbols,
less so for weird letter characters from the second part of _ctype[].

Syzbot triggers a warning in is_user_regdom_saved() by first sending
over an unexpected non-latin letter that gets malformed by toupper()
into a character that ends up failing isalpha() check.

Prevent this by enhancing is_an_alpha2() to ensure that incoming
symbols are latin letters and nothing else.

[1] Syzbot report:
--…

Source: OSV.dev (Open Source Vulnerabilities) NVD OSV

Auto-generated summary

Assembled by SecPulse from the source data (CVSS, CWE, affected versions) using templates — no AI involved. Check the original description and references below for exact details.

A vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-21910 has been found in Kernel.
Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure.
What to do: upgrade Kernel to 5.4.291, 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 6.1.131, 6.6.83, 6.12.19, 6.13.7 or later.
If unsure, ask your IT team or search "Kernel CVE-2025-21910" on the vendor's site.

CVE-2025-21910 (Kernel)
Patched: 5.4.291, 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 6.1.131, 6.6.83, 6.12.19, 6.13.7 — apply immediately
Plan: 1) Audit SBOM/dependencies, 2) Stage→prod upgrade, 3) Add WAF/proxy monitoring on affected endpoints, 4) Hunt IOCs in logs.
Refs: see the GHSA / vendor advisory / patched release linked on this page.

❓ What is the problem

A vulnerability (unclassified) exists in Kernel.

📍 Affected scope

Check the vendor advisory for the affected versions of Kernel.

🔥 Severity

Severity: ?. Risk of unauthorized operations or information disclosure.

🔧 How to fix

Update to 5.4.291, 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 6.1.131, 6.6.83, 6.12.19, 6.13.7.

🛡️ Workaround

Until the patch is applied: disable the affected feature, apply WAF rules, or restrict access via network ACLs.

🔍 Detection

Search webserver/proxy logs for unusual request patterns matching this CVE's known IOCs. Run grep -r 'Kernel' . against your dependency files (package-lock.json, requirements.txt, go.sum) to find affected services.

Response actions

Concrete steps and command examples for SOC/SRE teams to execute in order

1
Identify exposure identify
```
grep -r 'Kernel' . | grep -v node_modules
```
リポジトリと本番環境の依存ファイル (package-lock.json / requirements.txt / go.sum / Gemfile.lock 等) で Kernel を grep し、稼働しているサービス・バージョンを把握する。
2
Apply patch patch
```
Upgrade Kernel to 5.4.291, 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 6.1.131, 6.6.83, 6.12.19, 6.13.7
```
ステージング環境で 5.4.291, 5.10.235, 5.15.179, 6.1.131, 6.6.83, 6.12.19, 6.13.7 に上げて回帰テスト → 本番反映。回帰テストはアプリの主要ハッピーパスを含めること。
3
Post-deployment verification verify
```
Confirm patched version is live in production
```
パッチ適用後、ステージングで PoC または同等の悪用パターンを再現して脆弱性が閉じたことを確認。本番ではアクセスログ・WAF でアラート再発が無いか継続監視。

Affected packages

Linux Kernel

[{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"2.6.34"},{"fixed":"5.4.291"}]},{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"5.5.0"},{"fixed":"5.10.235"}]},{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"5.11.0"},{"fixed":"5.15.179"}]},{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"5.16.0"},{"fixed":"6.1.131"}]},{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"6.2.0"},{"fixed":"6.6.83"}]},{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"6.7.0"},{"fixed":"6.12.19"}]},{"type":"ECOSYSTEM","events":[{"introduced":"6.13.0"},{"fixed":"6.13.7"}]}]

Fix status by distribution

Fixed packages published by each distribution for this CVE

BellSoft Alpaquita BELL-CVE-2025-21910 linux-lts Fixed in: 6.1.131-r0
Debian DEBIAN-CVE-2025-21910 linux Fixed in: 5.10.237-1
Ubuntu UBUNTU-CVE-2025-21910 linux