What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-7889

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 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: 2017-04-17 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-732

Description

The mm subsystem in the Linux kernel through 3.2 does not properly enforce the CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM protection mechanism, which allows local users to read or write to kernel memory locations in the first megabyte (and bypass slab-allocation access restrictions) via an application that opens the /dev/mem file, related to arch/x86/mm/init.c and drivers/char/mem.c.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04, 14.04
• Debian Linux: 8.0
• Linux kernel: before 3.2.91; from 3.3 before 3.10.107; from 3.11 before 3.12.74; from 3.13 before 3.16.46; from 3.17 before 3.18.50; from 3.19 before 4.1.41 — fixed in 3.10.107, 3.12.74, 3.16.46, 3.18.50, 3.2.91, 4.1.41

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 3.10.107, 3.12.74, 3.16.46, 3.18.50. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=a4866aa812518ed1a37d8ea0c881dc946409de94
• http://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3945
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/04/16/4
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/97690
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017:1842
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017:2077
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2017:2669
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:1854
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/commit/?id=b8f254aa17f720053054c4ecff3920973a83b9d6
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a4866aa812518ed1a37d8ea0c881dc946409de94
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3583-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3583-2/

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