CVE-2025-38331

low-risk
Published 2025-07-10

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP It is desireable to push the hardware accelerator to also process non-segmented TCP frames: we pass the skb->len to the "TOE/TSO" offloader and it will handle them. Without this quirk the driver becomes unstable and lock up and and crash. I do not know exactly why, but it is probably due to the TOE (TCP offload engine) feature that is coupled with the segmentation feature - it is not possible to turn one part off and not the other, either both TOE and TSO are active, or neither of them. Not having the TOE part active seems detrimental, as if that hardware feature is not really supposed to be turned off. The datasheet says: "Based on packet parsing and TCP connection/NAT table lookup results, the NetEngine puts the packets belonging to the same TCP connection to the same queue for the software to process. The NetEngine puts incoming packets to the buffer or series of buffers for a jumbo packet. With this hardware acceleration, IP/TCP header parsing, checksum validation and connection lookup are offloaded from the software processing." After numerous tests with the hardware locking up after something between minutes and hours depending on load using iperf3 I have concluded this is necessary to stabilize the hardware.

Do I need to act?

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0.03% chance of exploitation
EPSS score — low exploit probability
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Not on CISA KEV list
No confirmed active exploitation reported to CISA
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Patch status unknown
Check vendor advisories for fix availability and mitigation guidance
5
CVSS 5.5/10 Medium
LOCAL / LOW complexity

Affected Products (2)

Affected Vendors

25
/ 100
low-risk
Severity 18/34 · Moderate
Exploitability 0/34 · Minimal
Exposure 7/34 · Low