CVE-2025-38557 — HID: apple: validate feature-report field count to prevent NULL pointer dereference

Affected: Linux

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

HID: apple: validate feature-report field count to prevent NULL pointer dereference

A malicious HID device with quirk APPLE_MAGIC_BACKLIGHT can trigger a NULL pointer dereference whilst the power feature-report is toggled and sent to the device in apple_magic_backlight_report_set(). The power feature-report is expected to have two data fields, but if the descriptor declares one field then accessing field[1] and dereferencing it in apple_magic_backlight_report_set() becomes invalid since field[1] will be NULL.

An example of a minimal descriptor which can cause the crash is something like the following where the report with ID 3 (power report) only references a single 1-byte field. When hid core parses the descriptor it will encounter the final feature tag, allocate a hid_report (all members of field[] will be zeroed out), create field structure and populate it, increasing the maxfield to 1. The subsequent field[1] access and dereference causes the crash.

Usage Page (Vendor Defined 0xFF00) Usage (0x0F) Collection (Application) Report ID (1) Usage (0x01) Logical Minimum (0) Logical Maximum (255) Report Size (8) Report Count (1) Feature (Data,Var,Abs)

Usage (0x02) Logical Maximum (32767) Report Size (16) Report Count (1) Feature (Data,Var,Abs)

Report ID (3) Usage (0x03) Logical Minimum (0) Logical Maximum (1) Report Size (8) Repo…

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CVE-2025-38557 — HID: apple: validate feature-report field count to prevent NULL pointer dereference