CVE-2025-38457

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

net/sched: Abort __tc_modify_qdisc if parent class does not exist

Lion’s patch [1] revealed an ancient bug in the qdisc API.
Whenever a user creates/modifies a qdisc specifying as a parent another
qdisc, the qdisc API will, during grafting, detect that the user is
not trying to attach to a class and reject. However grafting is
performed after qdisc_create (and thus the qdiscs’ init callback) is
executed. In qdiscs that eventually call qdisc_tree_reduce_backlog
during init or change (such as fq, hhf, choke, etc), an issue
arises. For example, executing the following commands:

sudo tc qdisc add dev lo root handle a: htb default 2
sudo tc qdisc add dev lo parent a: handle beef fq

Qdiscs such as fq, hhf, choke, etc unconditionally invoke
qdisc_tree_reduce_backlog() in their control path init() or change() which
then causes a failure to find the child class; however, that does not stop
the unconditional invocation of the assumed child qdisc’s qlen_notify with
a null class. All these qdiscs make the assumption that class is non-null.

The solution is ensure that qdisc_leaf() which looks up the parent
class, and is invoked prior to qdisc_create(), should return failure on
not finding the class.
In this patch, we leverage qdisc_leaf to return ERR_PTRs whenever the
parentid doesn’t correspond to a class, so that we can detect it
earlier on and abort before qdisc_create is called.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/d912cbd7-193b-4269-9857-525bee8bbb6a@gmail.com/