Technical impact
The vulnerability is a use‑after‑free in the powerz hwmon driver that occurs when a USB device is disconnected while the driver still holds a reference to the freed URB structure. A subsequent read operation dereferences the stale pointer, which can trigger a kernel crash. The weakness corresponds to CWE‑416 and CWE‑825, reflecting a use‑after‑free and a null pointer dereference.
Affected Systems
All versions of the Linux kernel that include the powerz hwmon driver and have not yet applied the fix that clears the URB pointer on disconnect are affected. The product is the Linux kernel; the vendor is Linux and the product identifier is Linux:Linux. Specific affected releases are those that do not contain the commit sequence referenced in the advisory links.
Risk and Exploitability
The CVSS score of 7.8 indicates a high severity impact if successfully exploited. The EPSS score is less than 1%, suggesting that exploitation events are rare. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. Based on the description, the attacker would need to cause a USB device to disconnect and then trigger a read operation. This attack vector is inferred from the stated conditions and requires the attacker to control the device or the environment to induce the disconnect. While not explicitly documented as feasible, it is considered difficult but not impossible to exploit under the right circumstances.
Debian DSA
Ubuntu USN