Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [,2.6.31.5)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.05% (19th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-3005473
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed22 Oct 2009
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 22 Oct 2009

CVE-2009-3621  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 2.6.31.5 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) net/unix/af_unix.c in the Linux kernel 2.6.31.4 and earlier allows local users to cause a denial of service (system hang) by creating an abstract-namespace AF_UNIX listening socket, performing a shutdown operation on this socket, and then performing a series of connect operations to this socket.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

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