CVE-2025-71140
- Published: 2026-01-14T15:16:03.793
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
media: mediatek: vcodec: Use spinlock for context list protection lock
Previously a mutex was added to protect the encoder and decoder context
lists from unexpected changes originating from the SCP IP block, causing
the context pointer to go invalid, resulting in a NULL pointer
dereference in the IPI handler.
Turns out on the MT8173, the VPU IPI handler is called from hard IRQ
context. This causes a big warning from the scheduler. This was first
reported downstream on the ChromeOS kernels, but is also reproducible
on mainline using Fluster with the FFmpeg v4l2m2m decoders. Even though
the actual capture format is not supported, the affected code paths
are triggered.
Since this lock just protects the context list and operations on it are
very fast, it should be OK to switch to a spinlock.
Related CVE by CWE
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How to fix CVE-2025-71140
Description: In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: media: mediatek: vcodec: Use spinlock for context list protection lock Previously a mutex was added to protect the encoder and decoder context lists from unexpected changes originating from the SCP IP block, causing the context pointer to go invalid, resulting in a NULL pointer dereference […]
Exploit Difficulty: HARD
⏱️ Time to exploit: > 4 hours
🛠️ Required skills: Advanced security expertise
💰 Public exploits: Rare or not public
How to Fix:
- Check if you're running the affected product
- Update to the latest patched version
- If patching is not immediately possible: restrict network exposure, apply least-privilege access
- Test the fix in a staging environment first
- Review logs for signs of exploitation
- Monitor for IOCs (Indicators of Compromise)
- Enable automatic security updates
- Set up vulnerability monitoring
- Review and harden security configurations
Exploit Difficulty Assessment
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CVE details first published to NVD database
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No vendor/product data available.