What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2005-3181

• Severity: low (CVSS 2.1 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2005-10-12 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-401

Description

The audit system in Linux kernel 2.6.6, and other versions before 2.6.13.4, when CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL is enabled, uses an incorrect function to free names_cache memory, which prevents the memory from being tracked by AUDITSYSCALL code and leads to a memory leak that allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption).

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 4.10, 5.04
• Debian Linux: 3.1
• Linux kernel: from 2.6.0 through 2.6.13.3
• Mandriva Linux: 10.1, 10.2, 2006.0

References

• http://kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commitdiff%3Bh=829841146878e082613a49581ae252c071057c23
• http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.6/cset%404346883bQBeBd26syWTKX2CVC5bDcA
• http://secunia.com/advisories/17114
• http://secunia.com/advisories/17280
• http://secunia.com/advisories/17364
• http://secunia.com/advisories/17826
• http://secunia.com/advisories/17917
• http://secunia.com/advisories/19374
• http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1017
• http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDKSA-2005:218
• http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDKSA-2005:219
• http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDKSA-2005:220

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