CVE-2025-68204

Vulnerability

Overview In the Linux kernel's SCMI power domain (pmdomain) driver for ARM platforms, a resource management flaw exists during probe. When of_genpd_add_provider_onecell() fails, the generic power domains (genpds) that were previously created and registered are not cleaned up, leading to a memory leak. This bug was introduced because the error path does not unwind the initialized domains before returning from probe.

Attack

Vector The vulnerability is triggered during driver probe on ARM systems such as the Juno Development Platform. An attacker with the ability to influence firmware responses or trigger probe failures (e.g., via malicious device tree or error injection) could cause the probe to fail mid-way. No authentication is required, as the bug occurs at boot time during kernel initialization.

Impact

The missing cleanup leads to dangling pointers to freed or never-freed memory. When the kernel later calls genpd_debug_add() during debugfs initialization, it attempts to access invalid memory, resulting in a kernel panic (oops) as seen in the crash trace. This effectively causes a denial of service on the system.

Mitigation

The fix adds proper error handling to release all previously created genpds upon failure in the probe function, ensuring all resources are correctly freed. The patch has been backported to multiple stable kernel branches [1][2][3]. Users should update to the latest kernel or apply the respective stable commits.