CVE-2010-4251

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 3.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2011-05-26 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

The socket implementation in net/core/sock.c in the Linux kernel before 2.6.34 does not properly manage a backlog of received packets, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by sending a large amount of network traffic, as demonstrated by netperf UDP tests.

Affected products

Linux kernel: before 2.6.34 — fixed in 2.6.34
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 4.0
VMware ESX: 4.0, 4.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 2.6.34. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=8eae939f1400326b06d0c9afe53d2a484a326871
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-netdev/2010/3/3/6271093/thread
http://secunia.com/advisories/46397
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.34
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/520102/100/0/threaded
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/46637
http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2011-0012.html
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657303
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=8eae939f1400326b06d0c9afe53d2a484a326871
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-netdev/2010/3/3/6271093/thread
http://secunia.com/advisories/46397
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.34

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