What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-15951

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• 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: 2017-10-28 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

The KEYS subsystem in the Linux kernel before 4.13.10 does not correctly synchronize the actions of updating versus finding a key in the "negative" state to avoid a race condition, which allows local users to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via crafted system calls.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 4.4 before 4.4.95; from 4.5 before 4.9.59; from 4.10 before 4.13.10 — fixed in 4.13.10, 4.4.95, 4.9.59

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.13.10, 4.4.95, 4.9.59. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=363b02dab09b3226f3bd1420dad9c72b79a42a76
• http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.13.10
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/101621
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/363b02dab09b3226f3bd1420dad9c72b79a42a76
• http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=363b02dab09b3226f3bd1420dad9c72b79a42a76
• http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.13.10
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/101621
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/363b02dab09b3226f3bd1420dad9c72b79a42a76

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