CVE-2018-1091

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: 2018-03-27 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-391

Description

In the flush_tmregs_to_thread function in arch/powerpc/kernel/ptrace.c in the Linux kernel before 4.13.5, a guest kernel crash can be triggered from unprivileged userspace during a core dump on a POWER host due to a missing processor feature check and an erroneous use of transactional memory (TM) instructions in the core dump path, leading to a denial of service.

Affected products

Linux kernel: through 4.13.4

References

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c1fa0768a8713b135848f78fd43ffc208d8ded70
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/03/27/4
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:1318
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2018-1091
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1558149
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/c1fa0768a8713b135848f78fd43ffc208d8ded70
https://marc.info/?l=linuxppc-embedded&m=150535531910494&w=2
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.13.5
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c1fa0768a8713b135848f78fd43ffc208d8ded70
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/03/27/4
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:1318
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2018-1091

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