CVE-2019-3901

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2019-04-22 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-667

Description

A race condition in perf_event_open() allows local attackers to leak sensitive data from setuid programs. As no relevant locks (in particular the cred_guard_mutex) are held during the ptrace_may_access() call, it is possible for the specified target task to perform an execve() syscall with setuid execution before perf_event_alloc() actually attaches to it, allowing an attacker to bypass the ptrace_may_access() check and the perf_event_exit_task(current) call that is performed in install_exec_creds() during privileged execve() calls. This issue affects kernel versions before 4.8.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 8.0
Linux kernel: before 4.8 — fixed in 4.8
NetApp Active Iq Unified Manager For Vmware Vsphere: from 9.5
NetApp Cn1610 Firmware: all versions
NetApp Hci Management Node: all versions
NetApp Snapprotect: all versions
NetApp Solidfire: all versions
NetApp Storage Replication Adapter For Clustered Data Ontap For Vmware Vsphere: from 7.2
NetApp Vasa Provider For Clustered Data Ontap: from 7.2
NetApp Virtual Storage Console For Vmware Vsphere: from 7.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.8. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2019-3901 or the next vulnerability affects your stack