Junglewise Threat Intelligence

CVE-2025-39943: Linux Kernel ksmbd out-of-bounds access in SMB Direct RDMA transport

CVE-2025-39943 · Severity: critical · CVSS 9.4 · Published 2025-10-04

Technologies: Linux Kernel. Vendors: Linux.

Executive brief

A vulnerability exists in the Linux kernel's ksmbd component, which provides file-sharing services (SMB) over high-speed RDMA networks. An attacker could exploit this flaw to cause a system crash or potentially access sensitive information by sending specially crafted network packets. This could lead to service outages or unauthorized data exposure in environments using high-performance storage networking.

Technical details

An out-of-bounds (OOB) vulnerability exists in the ksmbd (SMB3 server) component of the Linux kernel, specifically within the SMB Direct (RDMA) transport implementation. The root cause is a failure to properly validate the 'data_offset' and 'data_length' fields in the 'smb_direct_data_transfer' structure during packet processing in 'recv_done'. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can provide malicious offset or length values that exceed the allocated buffer size, leading to an OOB access. This can result in a denial of service (kernel crash) or information disclosure. Patches have been released for multiple stable kernel branches including 5.15.x, 6.1.x, 6.6.x, 6.12.x, and 6.16.x.

Affected products

  • Linux Linux Kernel 5.15 to 5.15.194, 6.1 to 6.1.154, 6.6 to 6.6.108, 6.12 to 6.12.49, 6.13 to 6.16.9

Timeline

  • 2025-09-10: patched: Initial patch authored by Namjae Jeon
  • 2025-10-04: disclosed: CVE published

References

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