CVE-2011-5321

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.0)
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: 2016-05-02 · updated 2026-06-16

Description

The tty_open function in drivers/tty/tty_io.c in the Linux kernel before 3.1.1 mishandles a driver-lookup failure, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and system crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via crafted access to a device file under the /dev/pts directory.

Affected products

Linux kernel: through 3.1

References

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c290f8358acaeffd8e0c551ddcc24d1206143376
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-1221.html
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/ChangeLog-3.1.1
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/03/13/17
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1201887
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/c290f8358acaeffd8e0c551ddcc24d1206143376
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c290f8358acaeffd8e0c551ddcc24d1206143376
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-1221.html
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/ChangeLog-3.1.1
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/03/13/17
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1201887
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/c290f8358acaeffd8e0c551ddcc24d1206143376

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