Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [,5.11)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.06% (18th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-3006709
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed10 Feb 2021
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 10 Feb 2021

CVE-2020-16120  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 5.11 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). Overlayfs did not properly perform permission checking when copying up files in an overlayfs and could be exploited from within a user namespace, if, for example, unprivileged user namespaces were allowed. It was possible to have a file not readable by an unprivileged user to be copied to a mountpoint controlled by the user, like a removable device. This was introduced in kernel version 4.19 by commit d1d04ef ("ovl: stack file ops"). This was fixed in kernel version 5.8 by commits 56230d9 ("ovl: verify permissions in ovl_path_open()"), 48bd024 ("ovl: switch to mounter creds in readdir") and 05acefb ("ovl: check permission to open real file"). Additionally, commits 130fdbc ("ovl: pass correct flags for opening real directory") and 292f902 ("ovl: call secutiry hook in ovl_real_ioctl()") in kernel 5.8 might also be desired or necessary. These additional commits introduced a regression in overlay mounts within user namespaces which prevented access to files with ownership outside of the user namespace. This regression was mitigated by subsequent commit b6650da ("ovl: do not fail because of O_NOATIMEi") in kernel 5.11.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1