Divide By Zero Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [,5.2.3)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.07% (24th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-3005763
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed26 Jul 2019
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 26 Jul 2019

CVE-2019-14284  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-369  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 5.2.3 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Divide By Zero. In the Linux kernel before 5.2.3, drivers/block/floppy.c allows a denial of service by setup_format_params division-by-zero. Two consecutive ioctls can trigger the bug: the first one should set the drive geometry with .sect and .rate values that make F_SECT_PER_TRACK be zero. Next, the floppy format operation should be called. It can be triggered by an unprivileged local user even when a floppy disk has not been inserted. NOTE: QEMU creates the floppy device by default.

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 Base Scores

version 3.1