CVE-2025-38235 – “Linux HID Backlight Reference Leak”

CVE ID : CVE-2025-38235

Published : July 6, 2025, 10:15 a.m. | 51 minutes ago

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

HID: appletb-kbd: fix “appletb_backlight” backlight device reference counting

During appletb_kbd_probe, probe attempts to get the backlight device
by name. When this happens backlight_device_get_by_name looks for a
device in the backlight class which has name “appletb_backlight” and
upon finding a match it increments the reference count for the device
and returns it to the caller. However this reference is never released
leading to a reference leak.

Fix this by decrementing the backlight device reference count on removal
via put_device and on probe failure.

Severity: 0.0 | NA

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