CVE-2019-5023

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.9 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: 2019-10-31 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-401

Description

An exploitable vulnerability exists in the grsecurity PaX patch for the function read_kmem, in PaX from version pax-linux-4.9.8-test1 to 4.9.24-test7, grsecurity official from version grsecurity-3.1-4.9.8-201702060653 to grsecurity-3.1-4.9.24-201704252333, grsecurity unofficial from version v4.9.25-unofficialgrsec to v4.9.74-unofficialgrsec. PaX adds a temp buffer to the read_kmem function, which is never freed when an invalid address is supplied. This results in a memory leakage that can lead to a crash of the system. An attacker needs to induce a read to /dev/kmem using an invalid address to exploit this vulnerability.

Affected products

Opensrcsec Grsecurity: from 3.1-4.9.8-201702060653 through 3.1-4.9.24-201704252333; from 4.9.25 through 4.9.74
Opensrcsec Pax: from pax-linux-4.9.8-test1 through pax-linux-4.9.8-test7

References

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