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CVE-2025-21920

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Apr 1, 2025Sources checked Oct 9, 2026
7.1HIGHCVSS out of 10
What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2025-21920 and is rated High severity with a CVSS score of 7.1. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

What to do next

Remediation and response

Microsoft Security Response Center guidance

Vendor revision: Aug 12, 2026

CBL-Mariner Releases

Vendor-listed releases

  • 6.6.85.1-2
  • 5.15.180.1-1
CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog
EPSS0.2%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability
Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field
Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships
Overview

What is CVE-2025-21920?

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

vlan: enforce underlying device type

Currently, VLAN devices can be created on top of non-ethernet devices.

Besides the fact that it doesn't make much sense, this also causes a bug which leaks the address of a kernel function to usermode.

When creating a VLAN device, we initialize GARP (garp_init_applicant) and MRP (mrp_init_applicant) for the underlying device.

As part of the initialization process, we add the multicast address of each applicant to the underlying device, by calling dev_mc_add.

__dev_mc_add uses dev->addr_len to determine the length of the new multicast address.

This causes an out-of-bounds read if dev->addr_len is greater than 6, since the multicast addresses provided by GARP and MRP are only 6 bytes long.

This behaviour can be reproduced using the following commands:

ip tunnel add gretest mode ip6gre local ::1 remote ::2 dev lo ip l set up dev gretest ip link add link gretest name vlantest type vlan id 100

Then, the following command will display the address of garp_pdu_rcv:

ip maddr show | grep 01:80:c2:00:00:21

Fix the bug by enforcing the type of the underlying device during VLAN device initialization.

Source: NVD