CVE-2006-5173

Severity: low (CVSS 2.1 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2006-10-17 · updated 2026-06-16

Description

Linux kernel does not properly save or restore EFLAGS during a context switch, or reset the flags when creating new threads, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (process crash), as demonstrated using a process that sets the Alignment Check flag (EFLAGS 0x40000), which triggers a SIGBUS in other processes that have an unaligned access.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 5.10, 6.06, 6.10
Linux kernel: from 2.4.0 through 2.6.19

References

http://kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=47a5c6fa0e204a2b63309c648bb2fde36836c826
http://secunia.com/advisories/23361
http://secunia.com/advisories/23384
http://secunia.com/advisories/23474
http://secunia.com/advisories/23593
http://secunia.com/advisories/25691
http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDKSA-2007:002
http://www.novell.com/linux/security/advisories/2006_79_kernel.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/471457
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/21851
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-395-1
http://kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=47a5c6fa0e204a2b63309c648bb2fde36836c826

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