What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2013-3301

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2013-04-29 · updated 2026-06-16

Description

The ftrace implementation in the Linux kernel before 3.8.8 allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and system crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact by leveraging the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability for write access to the (1) set_ftrace_pid or (2) set_graph_function file, and then making an lseek system call.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 3.1 before 3.2.44; from 3.3 before 3.4.49; from 3.5 before 3.8.8 — fixed in 3.2.44, 3.4.49, 3.8.8
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0
• RedHat Enterprise Mrg: 2.0
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1: 11-sp3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension: 11-sp3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 11-sp3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 3.2.44, 3.4.49, 3.8.8. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=6a76f8c0ab19f215af2a3442870eeb5f0e81998d
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2013-09/msg00003.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2013-12/msg00129.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-1051.html
• http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/ChangeLog-3.8.8
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2013/04/15/1
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1834-1
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1835-1
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1836-1
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1838-1
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=952197
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6a76f8c0ab19f215af2a3442870eeb5f0e81998d

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