CVE-2012-2127

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.0 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 4.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2012-06-21 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-119

Description

fs/proc/root.c in the procfs implementation in the Linux kernel before 3.2 does not properly interact with CLONE_NEWPID clone system calls, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (reference leak and memory consumption) by making many connections to a daemon that uses PID namespaces to isolate clients, as demonstrated by vsftpd.

Affected products

Linux kernel: through 3.1.10; 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.1.4, 3.1.5, 3.1.6 (+3)

References

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=905ad269c55fc62bee3da29f7b1d1efeba8aa1e1
http://ubuntu.com/usn/usn-1607-1
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/patch-3.2.bz2
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/04/20/25
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/04/22/1
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/55774
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1594-1
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=757783
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=815188
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/905ad269c55fc62bee3da29f7b1d1efeba8aa1e1
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=905ad269c55fc62bee3da29f7b1d1efeba8aa1e1

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