CVE-2017-6874

Severity: high (CVSS 7.0 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2017-03-14 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-362

Description

Race condition in kernel/ucount.c in the Linux kernel through 4.10.2 allows local users to cause a denial of service (use-after-free and system crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via crafted system calls that leverage certain decrement behavior that causes incorrect interaction between put_ucounts and get_ucounts.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 4.9 before 4.9.16; from 4.10 before 4.10.4 — fixed in 4.10.4, 4.9.16

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.10.4, 4.9.16. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=040757f738e13caaa9c5078bca79aa97e11dde88
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/96856
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/040757f738e13caaa9c5078bca79aa97e11dde88
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=040757f738e13caaa9c5078bca79aa97e11dde88
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/96856
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/040757f738e13caaa9c5078bca79aa97e11dde88

Get alerted when CVE-2017-6874 or the next vulnerability affects your stack