What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2020-10781
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: 2020-09-16 · updated 2026-10-08
- Weakness: CWE-732
Description
A flaw was found in the Linux Kernel before 5.8-rc6 in the ZRAM kernel module, where a user with a local account and the ability to read the /sys/class/zram-control/hot_add file can create ZRAM device nodes in the /dev/ directory. This read allocates kernel memory and is not accounted for a user that triggers the creation of that ZRAM device. With this vulnerability, continually reading the device may consume a large amount of system memory and cause the Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer to activate and terminate random userspace processes, possibly making the system inoperable.
Affected products
- Debian Linux: 9.0
- Linux kernel: before 5.8.0; 5.8.0, 5.8.0-rc1, 5.8.0-rc2, 5.8.0-rc3, 5.8.0-rc4, 5.8.0-rc5 — fixed in 5.8.0
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.8.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2020-10781
- https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=853eab68afc80f59f36bbdeb715e5c88c501e680
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/09/msg00025.html
- https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/06/18/1
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2020-10781
- https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=853eab68afc80f59f36bbdeb715e5c88c501e680
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/09/msg00025.html
- https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/06/18/1
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