CVE-2018-12232

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.9 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 6.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-06-12 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-362

Description

In net/socket.c in the Linux kernel through 4.17.1, there is a race condition between fchownat and close in cases where they target the same socket file descriptor, related to the sock_close and sockfs_setattr functions. fchownat does not increment the file descriptor reference count, which allows close to set the socket to NULL during fchownat's execution, leading to a NULL pointer dereference and system crash.

Affected products

Linux kernel: through 4.17.1

References

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6d8c50dcb029872b298eea68cc6209c866fd3e14
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/104453
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:2948
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6d8c50dcb029872b298eea68cc6209c866fd3e14
https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/6/5/14
https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/926519/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-1/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-2/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-3/
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6d8c50dcb029872b298eea68cc6209c866fd3e14
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/104453
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:2948

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