What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2010-3081

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 3.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2010-09-24 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-119

Description

The compat_alloc_user_space functions in include/asm/compat.h files in the Linux kernel before 2.6.36-rc4-git2 on 64-bit platforms do not properly allocate the userspace memory required for the 32-bit compatibility layer, which allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging the ability of the compat_mc_getsockopt function (aka the MCAST_MSFILTER getsockopt support) to control a certain length value, related to a "stack pointer underflow" issue, as exploited in the wild in September 2010.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: through 2.6.35.4; 2.6.36, 2.6.36-rc1, 2.6.36-rc2, 2.6.36-rc3
• Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop: 11-sp1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise: 11-sp1
• VMware ESX: 4.0, 4.1

References

• http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2010-09/0273.html
• http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2010-09/0278.html
• http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/09/cve-2010-3081/
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=c41d68a513c71e35a14f66d71782d27a79a81ea6
• http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=9574
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2010-09/msg00006.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2010-10/msg00003.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2011-02/msg00000.html
• http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=128461522230211&w=2
• http://secunia.com/advisories/42384
• http://secunia.com/advisories/43315
• http://sota.gen.nz/compat1/

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