CVE-2025-71140

CVE-2025-71140 is a security vulnerability that is still awaiting full analysis and scoring. It is not currently listed as actively exploited by CISA, and its EPSS exploit-prediction score is low.

Key facts

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 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.

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-71140?
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.
Is CVE-2025-71140 being actively exploited?
It is not currently listed in CISA's KEV catalog. Its EPSS exploit-prediction score is 0% (7th percentile), an estimate of the probability of exploitation in the next 30 days.
How do I fix CVE-2025-71140?
Review the linked vendor and NVD advisories for patched versions and mitigations, then upgrade or apply the recommended workaround.
Does CVE-2025-71140 have an EU (EUVD) identifier?
Yes. CVE-2025-71140 is tracked in the ENISA EU Vulnerability Database (EUVD) as EUVD-2026-2476.
When was CVE-2025-71140 published?
CVE-2025-71140 was published on 2026-01-14 and last updated on 2026-06-17.

References