CVE-2009-1238

Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2009-04-02 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-362

Description

Race condition in the HFS vfs sysctl interface in XNU 1228.8.20 and earlier on Apple Mac OS X 10.5.6 and earlier allows local users to cause a denial of service (kernel memory corruption) by simultaneously executing the same HFS_SET_PKG_EXTENSIONS code path in multiple threads, which is problematic because of lack of mutex locking for an unspecified global variable.

Affected products

macOS: through 10.5.6; 10.0, 10.0.0, 10.0.1, 10.0.2, 10.0.3, 10.0.4 (+49)
Apple Mac Os X Server: through 10.5.6; 10.0, 10.0.0, 10.0.1, 10.0.2, 10.0.3, 10.0.4 (+48)

References

http://secunia.com/advisories/34424
http://www.digit-labs.org/files/exploits/xnu-vfssysctl-dos.c
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216401181
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34202
https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/8265
http://secunia.com/advisories/34424
http://www.digit-labs.org/files/exploits/xnu-vfssysctl-dos.c
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216401181
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34202
https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/8265

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