What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2008-2365

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 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: yes
• Published: 2008-06-30 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-362

Description

Race condition in the ptrace and utrace support in the Linux kernel 2.6.9 through 2.6.25, as used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4, allows local users to cause a denial of service (oops) via a long series of PTRACE_ATTACH ptrace calls to another user's process that trigger a conflict between utrace_detach and report_quiescent, related to "late ptrace_may_attach() check" and "race around &dead_engine_ops setting," a different vulnerability than CVE-2007-0771 and CVE-2008-1514. NOTE: this issue might only affect kernel versions before 2.6.16.x.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 2.6.9, 2.6.10, 2.6.10-rc2, 2.6.11, 2.6.11-rc2, 2.6.11-rc3 (+147)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 4.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 4.0

References

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.25.y.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=5ecfbae093f0c37311e89b29bfc0c9d586eace87
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.25.y.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=f358166a9405e4f1d8e50d8f415c26d95505b6de
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.25.y.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=f5b40e363ad6041a96e3da32281d8faa191597b9
• http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=117863520707703&w=2
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0508.html
• http://secunia.com/advisories/30850
• http://secunia.com/advisories/31107
• http://securityreason.com/securityalert/3965
• http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/tests/ptrace-tests/tests/late-ptrace-may-attach-check.c?cvsroot=systemtap
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2008/06/26/1
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2008/07/14/1
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/29945

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