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CVE intelligence

CVE-2025-21991

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Apr 2, 2025Sources checked Oct 9, 2026
7.8HIGHCVSS out of 10
What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2025-21991 and is rated High severity with a CVSS score of 7.8. 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-2025-21991?

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

x86/microcode/AMD: Fix out-of-bounds on systems with CPU-less NUMA nodes

Currently, load_microcode_amd() iterates over all NUMA nodes, retrieves their CPU masks and unconditionally accesses per-CPU data for the first CPU of each mask.

According to Documentation/admin-guide/mm/numaperf.rst:

"Some memory may share the same node as a CPU, and others are provided as memory only nodes."

Therefore, some node CPU masks may be empty and wouldn't have a "first CPU".

On a machine with far memory (and therefore CPU-less NUMA nodes): - cpumask_of_node(nid) is 0 - cpumask_first(0) is CONFIG_NR_CPUS - cpu_data(CONFIG_NR_CPUS) accesses the cpu_info per-CPU array at an index that is 1 out of bounds

This does not have any security implications since flashing microcode is a privileged operation but I believe this has reliability implications by potentially corrupting memory while flashing a microcode update.

When booting with CONFIG_UBSAN_BOUNDS=y on an AMD machine that flashes a microcode update. I get the following splat:

UBSAN: array-index-out-of-bounds in arch/x86/kernel/cpu/microcode/amd.c:X:Y index 512 is out of range for type 'unsigned long[512]' [...] Call Trace: dump_stack __ubsan_handle_out_of_bounds load_microcode_amd request_microcode_amd reload_store kernfs_fop_write_iter vfs_write ksys_write do_syscall_64 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe

Change the loop to go over only NUMA nodes which have CPUs before determining whether the first CPU on the respective node needs microcode update.

[ bp: Massage commit message, fix typo. ]

Source: NVD