What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2010-2955

• 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: 2010-09-08 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-193

Description

The cfg80211_wext_giwessid function in net/wireless/wext-compat.c in the Linux kernel before 2.6.36-rc3-next-20100831 does not properly initialize certain structure members, which allows local users to leverage an off-by-one error in the ioctl_standard_iw_point function in net/wireless/wext-core.c, and obtain potentially sensitive information from kernel heap memory, via vectors involving an SIOCGIWESSID ioctl call that specifies a large buffer size.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 8.04, 9.04, 9.10, 10.04, 10.10
• Linux kernel: before 2.6.36; 2.6.36, 2.6.36-rc1, 2.6.36-rc2 — fixed in 2.6.36
• Opensuse: 11.1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1: 11
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time Extension: 11-sp1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 11

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 2.6.36. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2290
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=42da2f948d949efd0111309f5827bf0298bcc9a4
• http://grsecurity.net/~spender/wireless-infoleak-fix2.patch
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2010-11/msg00000.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2011-02/msg00000.html
• http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/27/413
• http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/30/127
• http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/30/146
• http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/30/351
• http://secunia.com/advisories/41245
• http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/next/patch-v2.6.36-rc3-next-20100831.bz2
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/08/31/1

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