What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2014-8173

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v2.0)
• 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: 2015-03-16 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

The pmd_none_or_trans_huge_or_clear_bad function in include/asm-generic/pgtable.h in the Linux kernel before 3.13 on NUMA systems does not properly determine whether a Page Middle Directory (PMD) entry is a transparent huge-table entry, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and system crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted MADV_WILLNEED madvise system call that leverages the absence of a page-table lock.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 3.9 before 3.10.76; from 3.11 before 3.12.43 — fixed in 3.10.76, 3.12.43

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 3.10.76, 3.12.43. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=ee53664bda169f519ce3c6a22d378f0b946c8178
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2015-04/msg00009.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0290.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0694.html
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1198457
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ee53664bda169f519ce3c6a22d378f0b946c8178
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=ee53664bda169f519ce3c6a22d378f0b946c8178
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2015-04/msg00009.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0290.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0694.html
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1198457
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ee53664bda169f519ce3c6a22d378f0b946c8178

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