Medium [CVE-2025-61661] Grub2: grub2: out-of-bounds write via malicious usb device
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2025-61661 affecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
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Summary
A vulnerability has been identified in the GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) component. This flaw occurs because the bootloader mishandles string conversion when reading information from a USB device, allowing an attacker to exploit inconsistent length values.
A local attacker can connect a maliciously configured USB device during the boot sequence to trigger this issue. A successful exploitation may lead GRUB to crash, leading to a Denial of Service.
Data corruption may be also possible, although given the complexity of the exploit the impact is most likely limited. This vulnerability was rated as having the impact of Moderate by the Red Hat Product Security Engineering team.
To exploit this flaw the attacker needs to have physical access to the machine and connect a maliciously crafted USB device which will leverage the lack of string size validation to cause a out-of-bounds write when reading strings from it. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 4.8 (CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-131. Affected Red Hat products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9; Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.
Red Hat does not currently list a fixing RHSA for this CVE.
Affected products named by the advisory: Red Hat package: grub2.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- As a mitigation Red Hat doesn't recommend to connect untrusted or unknown USB devices to the machine.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
Discussion(0)
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