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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2023-53011 json

net: stmmac: enable all safety features by default

published 2025-03-27 19 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2023-59709

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 10%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

net: stmmac: enable all safety features by default

In the original implementation of dwmac5 commit 8bf993a5877e ("net: stmmac: Add support for DWMAC5 and implement Safety Features") all safety features were enabled by default.

Later it seems some implementations didn't have support for all the features, so in commit 5ac712dcdfef ("net: stmmac: enable platform specific safety features") the safety_feat_cfg structure was added to the callback and defined for some platforms to selectively enable these safety features.

The problem is that only certain platforms were given that software support. If the automotive safety package bit is set in the hardware features register the safety feature callback is called for the platform, and for platforms that didn't get a safety_feat_cfg defined this results in the following NULL pointer dereference:

[ 7.933303] Call trace: [ 7.935812] dwmac5_safety_feat_config+0x20/0x170 [stmmac] [ 7.941455] __stmmac_open+0x16c/0x474 [stmmac] [ 7.946117] stmmac_open+0x38/0x70 [stmmac] [ 7.950414] __dev_open+0x100/0x1dc [ 7.954006] __dev_change_flags+0x18c/0x204 [ 7.958297] dev_change_flags+0x24/0x6c [ 7.962237] do_setlink+0x2b8/0xfa4 [ 7.965827] __rtnl_newlink+0x4ec/0x840 [ 7.969766] rtnl_newlink+0x50/0x80 [ 7.973353] rtnetlink_rcv_msg+0x12c/0x374 [ 7.977557] netlink_rcv_skb+0x5c/0x130 [ 7.981500] rtnetlink_rcv+0x18/0x2c [ 7.985172] netlink_unicast+0x2e8/0x340 [ 7.989197] netlink_sendmsg+0x1a8/0x420 [ 7.993222] ____sys_sendmsg+0x218/0x280 [ 7.997249] ___sys_sendmsg+0xac/0x100 [ 8.001103] __sys_sendmsg+0x84/0xe0 [ 8.004776] __arm64_sys_sendmsg+0x24/0x30 [ 8.008983] invoke_syscall+0x48/0x114 [ 8.012840] el0_svc_common.constprop.0+0xcc/0xec [ 8.017665] do_el0_svc+0x38/0xb0 [ 8.021071] el0_svc+0x2c/0x84 [ 8.024212] el0t_64_sync_handler+0xf4/0x120 [ 8.028598] el0t_64_sync+0x190/0x194

Go back to the original behavior, if the automotive safety package is found to be supported in hardware enable all the features unless safety_feat_cfg is passed in saying this particular platform only supports a subset of the features.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.15.91, 6.1.9, 6.2
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 6.1.11-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53011

  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-70.77
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1034.38
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1032.40
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1031.36
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1028.31
  • linux-kvm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1031.36
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1036.43
  • linux-gkeop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1018.23

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2023-53011

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2023-53011 updated cvss 4.4

kernel: net: stmmac: enable all safety features by default

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
13 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 10% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CISA ADP 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CNA 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.