CVE-2015-8952

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.0)
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: 2016-10-16 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-19

Description

The mbcache feature in the ext2 and ext4 filesystem implementations in the Linux kernel before 4.6 mishandles xattr block caching, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (soft lockup) via filesystem operations in environments that use many attributes, as demonstrated by Ceph and Samba.

Affected products

Linux kernel: through 4.5.7

References

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=82939d7999dfc1f1998c4b1c12e2f19edbdff272
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=be0726d33cb8f411945884664924bed3cb8c70ee
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f9a61eb4e2471c56a63cd804c7474128138c38ac
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/08/22/2
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/08/25/4
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107301
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1360968
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/82939d7999dfc1f1998c4b1c12e2f19edbdff272
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/be0726d33cb8f411945884664924bed3cb8c70ee
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f9a61eb4e2471c56a63cd804c7474128138c38ac
https://lwn.net/Articles/668718/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3582-1/

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