CVE-2015-8970

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: 2016-11-28 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

crypto/algif_skcipher.c in the Linux kernel before 4.4.2 does not verify that a setkey operation has been performed on an AF_ALG socket before an accept system call is processed, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and system crash) via a crafted application that does not supply a key, related to the lrw_crypt function in crypto/lrw.c.

Affected products

Linux kernel: through 4.4.1

References

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=dd504589577d8e8e70f51f997ad487a4cb6c026f
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.4.2
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/11/04/3
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94217
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017:1842
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017:2077
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017:2437
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017:2444
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1386286
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/dd504589577d8e8e70f51f997ad487a4cb6c026f
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21msg/syzkaller/frb2XrB5aWk/xCXzkIBcDAAJ
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=dd504589577d8e8e70f51f997ad487a4cb6c026f

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