What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2012-0879

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2012-05-17 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

The I/O implementation for block devices in the Linux kernel before 2.6.33 does not properly handle the CLONE_IO feature, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (I/O instability) by starting multiple processes that share an I/O context.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 10.04
• Debian Linux: 6.0
• Linux kernel: before 2.6.33 — fixed in 2.6.33
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1: 11-sp1, 11-sp2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension: 11-sp1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 11-sp1, 11-sp2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 2.6.33. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.33
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=61cc74fbb87af6aa551a06a370590c9bc07e29d9
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=b69f2292063d2caf37ca9aec7d63ded203701bf3
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-05/msg00013.html
• http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=139447903326211&w=2
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0481.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0531.html
• http://secunia.com/advisories/48545
• http://secunia.com/advisories/48842
• http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2469
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/02/23/5
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id?1027086

Get alerted when CVE-2012-0879 or the next vulnerability affects your stack