CVE-2020-14314

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2020-09-15 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-125

Description

A memory out-of-bounds read flaw was found in the Linux kernel before 5.9-rc2 with the ext3/ext4 file system, in the way it accesses a directory with broken indexing. This flaw allows a local user to crash the system if the directory exists. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 20.04
Debian Linux: 9.0
Linux kernel: through 5.8.9; 5.9.0-rc1
Starwindsoftware Starwind Virtual San: v8-build12533, v8-build12658, v8-build12859, v8-build13170, v8-build13586, v8-build13861

References

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2020-14314
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=5872331b3d91820e14716632ebb56b1399b34fe1
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/09/msg00025.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/10/msg00032.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/10/msg00034.html
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-ext4/f53e246b-647c-64bb-16ec-135383c70ad7%40redhat.com/T/#u
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4576-1/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4578-1/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4579-1/
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/security/sw-20210325-0003/
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2020-14314
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=5872331b3d91820e14716632ebb56b1399b34fe1

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