What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-5972

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 23.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2017-02-14 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

The TCP stack in the Linux kernel 3.x does not properly implement a SYN cookie protection mechanism for the case of a fast network connection, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) by sending many TCP SYN packets, as demonstrated by an attack against the kernel-3.10.0 package in CentOS Linux 7. NOTE: third parties have been unable to discern any relationship between the GitHub Engineering finding and the Trigemini.c attack code.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 3.0.0 through 3.19.8

References

• http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q1/573
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/96231
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2017-5972
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1422081
• https://cxsecurity.com/issue/WLB-2017020112
• https://githubengineering.com/syn-flood-mitigation-with-synsanity/
• https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/141083/CentOS7-Kernel-Denial-Of-Service.html
• https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-5972
• https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/41350/
• http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q1/573
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/96231
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2017-5972

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