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Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

CVE-2025-21788

Severity Medium
Score 5.5/10

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: ethernet: ti: am65-cpsw: fix memleak in certain XDP cases If the XDP program doesn't result in XDP_PASS then we leak the memory allocated by am65_cpsw_build_skb(). It is pointless to allocate SKB memory before running the XDP program as we would be wasting CPU cycles for cases other than XDP_PASS. Move the SKB allocation after evaluating the XDP program result. This fixes the memleak. A performance boost is seen for XDP_DROP test. XDP_DROP test: Before: 460256 rx/s 0 err/s After: 784130 rx/s 0 err/s

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-401 - Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)

'Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)' is a weakness that occurs when software doesn't effectively release allocated memory after it is used. If not addressed, this enables attackers to launch denial of service attacks (by crashing or hanging the program) or take advantage of other unexpected behavior resulting from low memory conditions.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published