What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-12656

• 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: 2020-05-05 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-401

Description

gss_mech_free in net/sunrpc/auth_gss/gss_mech_switch.c in the rpcsec_gss_krb5 implementation in the Linux kernel through 5.6.10 lacks certain domain_release calls, leading to a memory leak. Note: This was disputed with the assertion that the issue does not grant any access not already available. It is a problem that on unloading a specific kernel module some memory is leaked, but loading kernel modules is a privileged operation. A user could also write a kernel module to consume any amount of memory they like and load that replicating the effect of this bug

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 20.04
• Linux kernel: through 5.6.10
• openSUSE Leap: 15.1, 15.2

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-06/msg00022.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-07/msg00008.html
• https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206651
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4483-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4485-1/
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-06/msg00022.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-07/msg00008.html
• https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206651
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4483-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4485-1/

Get alerted when CVE-2020-12656 or the next vulnerability affects your stack