Junglewise Threat Intelligence

CVE-2025-71191: Linux Kernel resource leak in at_hdmac DMA engine driver

CVE-2025-71191 · Severity: medium · CVSS 5.5 · Published 2026-01-31

Technologies: Linux Kernel. Vendors: Linux.

Executive brief

A vulnerability in the Linux kernel's DMA engine driver for Atmel HDMAC controllers could allow a local user to cause a resource leak. By repeatedly triggering certain DMA operations, the system may fail to release hardware device references, eventually leading to resource exhaustion and potential system instability or a denial-of-service condition. This affects systems using specific Atmel hardware components.

Technical details

A reference counting vulnerability exists in the at_hdmac DMA engine driver within the Linux kernel. The function of_dma_xlate() acquires a reference to the DMA platform device, but the driver fails to call put_device() when releasing channel resources in atc_free_chan_resources() during successful allocation paths. This results in a persistent device reference leak. An attacker with local access could potentially exploit this to exhaust kernel memory or prevent hardware modules from being properly unloaded, leading to a denial-of-service. The issue has been patched across multiple stable kernel branches by ensuring put_device() is called on the associated dma_dev before freeing the slave structure.

Affected products

  • Linux Linux Kernel 3.10 to 5.10.249, 5.11 to 5.15.199, 5.16 to 6.1.162, 6.2 to 6.6.122, 6.7 to 6.12.67, 6.13 to 6.18.7

Timeline

  • 2025-11-17: other: Patch authored by Johan Hovold
  • 2026-01-31: disclosed: CVE published
  • 2026-02-06: patched: Patch committed to stable trees

References