CVE-2025-48502 is a vulnerability identified in AMD μProf, a performance profiling tool used primarily for analyzing AMD processor behavior. The root cause is improper validation of specified indexes, positions, or offsets in input parameters, classified under CWE-1285. This flaw allows a local attacker with limited privileges to overwrite Model-Specific Registers (MSRs), which are special CPU registers used to control hardware functions and performance monitoring. Overwriting MSRs improperly can lead to system instability, crashes, or denial of service conditions. The vulnerability requires local access (AV:L) and low attack complexity (AC:L), with privileges required (PR:L) but no user interaction (UI:N). The scope is unchanged (S:U), and the impact affects availability only (A:H), with no confidentiality or integrity impact. The CVSS v3.1 base score is 5.5, indicating a medium severity. No patches or known exploits are currently available, but the vulnerability is publicly disclosed and assigned a CVE ID. The lack of patch links suggests that mitigation depends on future vendor updates or workarounds. Since AMD μProf is used mainly by system administrators and performance engineers, the attack surface is limited to local users with some privileges on affected systems.

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2025-48502 is operational disruption due to potential system crashes or denial of service on machines running AMD μProf. This can affect performance monitoring and profiling activities critical for optimizing server and workstation environments. Industries relying heavily on AMD hardware for compute-intensive tasks, such as finance, manufacturing, research, and critical infrastructure, may experience downtime or degraded system reliability. While confidentiality and integrity are not directly compromised, availability issues can lead to loss of productivity and increased operational costs. Organizations with strict uptime requirements or those using AMD μProf in production environments should be particularly cautious. The vulnerability does not enable remote exploitation, limiting its impact to insider threats or compromised local accounts.

To mitigate CVE-2025-48502, European organizations should: 1) Monitor AMD’s official channels for patches or updates addressing this vulnerability and apply them promptly once released. 2) Restrict access to AMD μProf and related profiling tools to trusted administrators only, minimizing the number of users with local privileges. 3) Implement strict local user account management and auditing to detect unauthorized access attempts. 4) Use endpoint protection solutions capable of monitoring unusual local activity or attempts to manipulate MSRs. 5) Consider isolating systems running AMD μProf from critical production environments until a patch is available. 6) Educate system administrators about the risks of improper input validation vulnerabilities and the importance of applying security updates. 7) If possible, disable or uninstall AMD μProf on systems where it is not essential to reduce the attack surface.