CVE-2025-37799

vmxnet3: Fix malformed packet sizing in vmxnet3_process_xdp

published May 3, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
28.6
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

vmxnet3: Fix malformed packet sizing in vmxnet3_process_xdp

vmxnet3 driver's XDP handling is buggy for packet sizes using ring0 (that

is, packet sizes between 128 - 3k bytes).

We noticed MTU-related connectivity issues with Cilium's service load-

balancing in case of vmxnet3 as NIC underneath. A simple curl to a HTTP

backend service where the XDP LB was doing IPIP encap led to overly large

packet sizes but only for *some* of the packets (e.g. HTTP GET request)

while others (e.g. the prior TCP 3WHS) looked completely fine on the wire.

In fact, the pcap recording on the backend node actually revealed that the

node with the XDP LB was leaking uninitialized kernel data onto the wire

for the affected packets, for example, while the packets should have been

152 bytes their actual size was 1482 bytes, so the remainder after 152 bytes

was padded with whatever other data was in that page at the time (e.g. we

saw user/payload data from prior processed packets).

We only noticed this through an MTU issue, e.g. when the XDP LB node and

the backend node both had the same MTU (e.g. 1500) then the curl request

got dropped on the backend node's NIC given the packet was too large even

though the IPIP-encapped packet normally would never even come close to

the MTU limit. Lowering the MTU on the XDP LB (e.g. 1480) allowed to let

the curl request succeed (which also indicates that the kernel ignored the

padding, and thus the issue wasn't very user-visible).

Commit e127ce7699c1 ("vmxnet3: Fix missing reserved tailroom") was too eager

to also switch xdp_prepare_buff() from rcd->len to rbi->len. It really needs

to stick to rcd->len which is the actual packet length from the descriptor.

The latter we also feed into vmxnet3_process_xdp_small(), by the way, and

it indicates the correct length needed to initialize the xdp->{data,data_end}

parts. For e127ce7699c1 ("vmxnet3: Fix missing reserved tailroom") the

relevant part was adapting xdp_init_buff() to address the warning given the

xdp_data_hard_end() depends on xdp->frame_sz. With that fixed, traffic on

the wire looks good again.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00360 · 28.6th percentile
Published
2025-05-03T11:39Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 03 MAY 11:39Z
    vmxnet3: Fix malformed packet sizing in vmxnet3_process_xdp
    cvelistv5