CVE-2017-15102

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.3 v3.0)
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: 2017-11-15 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

The tower_probe function in drivers/usb/misc/legousbtower.c in the Linux kernel before 4.8.1 allows local users (who are physically proximate for inserting a crafted USB device) to gain privileges by leveraging a write-what-where condition that occurs after a race condition and a NULL pointer dereference.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04, 14.04
Linux kernel: before 4.8.1 — fixed in 4.8.1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 5.0, 6.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.8.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=2fae9e5a7babada041e2e161699ade2447a01989
http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q4/238
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/101790
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1505905
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/2fae9e5a7babada041e2e161699ade2447a01989
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3583-1/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3583-2/
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=2fae9e5a7babada041e2e161699ade2447a01989
http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q4/238
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/101790
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1505905
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/2fae9e5a7babada041e2e161699ade2447a01989

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