Race Condition Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [,4.17.3)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.03% (6th percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications

Snyk Learn

Learn about Race Condition vulnerabilities in an interactive lesson.

Start learning
  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-3005169
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed22 Jun 2018
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 22 Jun 2018

CVE-2018-12633  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-362  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 4.17.3 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Race Condition. An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.2. vbg_misc_device_ioctl() in drivers/virt/vboxguest/vboxguest_linux.c reads the same user data twice with copy_from_user. The header part of the user data is double-fetched, and a malicious user thread can tamper with the critical variables (hdr.size_in and hdr.size_out) in the header between the two fetches because of a race condition, leading to severe kernel errors, such as buffer over-accesses. This bug can cause a local denial of service and information leakage.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1