What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-1120

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 7.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2018-06-20 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-122

Description

A flaw was found affecting the Linux kernel before version 4.17. By mmap()ing a FUSE-backed file onto a process's memory containing command line arguments (or environment strings), an attacker can cause utilities from psutils or procps (such as ps, w) or any other program which makes a read() call to the /proc/<pid>/cmdline (or /proc/<pid>/environ) files to block indefinitely (denial of service) or for some controlled time (as a synchronization primitive for other attacks).

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04
• Debian Linux: 8.0
• Linux kernel: before 4.17 — fixed in 4.17
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 7.0
• RedHat Virtualization Host: 4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.17. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2018/q2/122
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/104229
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:2948
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3083
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3096
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-1120
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=7f7ccc2ccc2e70c6054685f5e3522efa81556830
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/07/msg00020.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201805-14
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-2/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-3/

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