What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2018-12896
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.0)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: yes
- Published: 2018-07-02 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-190
Description
An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.3. An Integer Overflow in kernel/time/posix-timers.c in the POSIX timer code is caused by the way the overrun accounting works. Depending on interval and expiry time values, the overrun can be larger than INT_MAX, but the accounting is int based. This basically makes the accounting values, which are visible to user space via timer_getoverrun(2) and siginfo::si_overrun, random. For example, a local user can cause a denial of service (signed integer overflow) via crafted mmap, futex, timer_create, and timer_settime system calls.
Affected products
- Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04, 14.04, 16.04, 18.04
- Debian Linux: 8.0
- Linux kernel: through 4.17.3
References
- https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200189
- https://github.com/lcytxw/bug_repro/tree/master/bug_200189
- https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/78c9c4dfbf8c04883941445a195276bb4bb92c76
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/03/msg00017.html
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/03/msg00034.html
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/04/msg00004.html
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3847-1/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3847-2/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3847-3/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3848-1/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3848-2/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/3849-1/
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