CVE-2025-71152 — net: dsa: properly keep track of conduit reference

Affected: Linux

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

net: dsa: properly keep track of conduit reference

Problem description -------------------

DSA has a mumbo-jumbo of reference handling of the conduit net device and its kobject which, sadly, is just wrong and doesn't make sense.

There are two distinct problems.

1. The OF path, which uses of_find_net_device_by_node(), never releases the elevated refcount on the conduit's kobject. Nominally, the OF and non-OF paths should result in objects having identical reference counts taken, and it is already suspicious that dsa_dev_to_net_device() has a put_device() call which is missing in dsa_port_parse_of(), but we can actually even verify that an issue exists. With CONFIG_DEBUG_KOBJECT_RELEASE=y, if we run this command "before" and "after" applying this patch:

(unbind the conduit driver for net device eno2) echo 0000:00:00.2 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/fsl_enetc/unbind

we see these lines in the output diff which appear only with the patch applied:

kobject: 'eno2' (ffff002009a3a6b8): kobject_release, parent 0000000000000000 (delayed 1000) kobject: '109' (ffff0020099d59a0): kobject_release, parent 0000000000000000 (delayed 1000)

2. After we find the conduit interface one way (OF) or another (non-OF), it can get unregistered at any time, and DSA remains with a long-lived, but in this case stale, cpu_dp->conduit pointer. Holding the net device's underlying kobject isn't actually of much…

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CVE-2025-71152 — net: dsa: properly keep track of conduit reference