CVE-2025-37864

net: dsa: clean up FDB, MDB, VLAN entries on unbind

published May 9, 2025

CVSS
—
EPSS
0%
Percentile
21.4
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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

net: dsa: clean up FDB, MDB, VLAN entries on unbind

As explained in many places such as commit b117e1e8a86d ("net: dsa:

delete dsa_legacy_fdb_add and dsa_legacy_fdb_del"), DSA is written given

the assumption that higher layers have balanced additions/deletions.

As such, it only makes sense to be extremely vocal when those

assumptions are violated and the driver unbinds with entries still

present.

But Ido Schimmel points out a very simple situation where that is wrong:

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/ZDazSM5UsPPjQuKr@shredder/

(also briefly discussed by me in the aforementioned commit).

Basically, while the bridge bypass operations are not something that DSA

explicitly documents, and for the majority of DSA drivers this API

simply causes them to go to promiscuous mode, that isn't the case for

all drivers. Some have the necessary requirements for bridge bypass

operations to do something useful - see dsa_switch_supports_uc_filtering().

Although in tools/testing/selftests/net/forwarding/local_termination.sh,

we made an effort to popularize better mechanisms to manage address

filters on DSA interfaces from user space - namely macvlan for unicast,

and setsockopt(IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP) - through mtools - for multicast, the

fact is that 'bridge fdb add ... self static local' also exists as

kernel UAPI, and might be useful to someone, even if only for a quick

hack.

It seems counter-productive to block that path by implementing shim

.ndo_fdb_add and .ndo_fdb_del operations which just return -EOPNOTSUPP

in order to prevent the ndo_dflt_fdb_add() and ndo_dflt_fdb_del() from

running, although we could do that.

Accepting that cleanup is necessary seems to be the only option.

Especially since we appear to be coming back at this from a different

angle as well. Russell King is noticing that the WARN_ON() triggers even

for VLANs:

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/[email protected]/

What happens in the bug report above is that dsa_port_do_vlan_del() fails,

then the VLAN entry lingers on, and then we warn on unbind and leak it.

This is not a straight revert of the blamed commit, but we now add an

informational print to the kernel log (to still have a way to see

that bugs exist), and some extra comments gathered from past years'

experience, to justify the logic.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS
Not scored
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00299 · 21.4th percentile
Published
2025-05-09T06:43Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 09 MAY 06:43Z
    net: dsa: clean up FDB, MDB, VLAN entries on unbind
    cvelistv5