CVE-2019-11487

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2019-04-23 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-416

Description

The Linux kernel before 5.1-rc5 allows page->_refcount reference count overflow, with resultant use-after-free issues, if about 140 GiB of RAM exists. This is related to fs/fuse/dev.c, fs/pipe.c, fs/splice.c, include/linux/mm.h, include/linux/pipe_fs_i.h, kernel/trace/trace.c, mm/gup.c, and mm/hugetlb.c. It can occur with FUSE requests.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04, 19.04
Debian Linux: 8.0
Linux kernel: before 4.4.216; from 4.5 before 4.9.181; from 4.10 before 4.14.116; from 4.15 before 4.19.39; from 4.20 before 5.0.12; 5.1-rc1, 5.1-rc2, 5.1-rc3, 5.1-rc4 — fixed in 4.14.116, 4.19.39, 4.4.216, 4.9.181, 5.0.12

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.14.116, 4.19.39, 4.4.216, 4.9.181. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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