What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-25285

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.4 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: 2020-09-13 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-362

Description

A race condition between hugetlb sysctl handlers in mm/hugetlb.c in the Linux kernel before 5.8.8 could be used by local attackers to corrupt memory, cause a NULL pointer dereference, or possibly have unspecified other impact, aka CID-17743798d812.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 20.04
• Debian Linux: 9.0
• Linux kernel: before 5.8.8 — fixed in 5.8.8

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.8.8. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/ChangeLog-5.8.8
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=17743798d81238ab13050e8e2833699b54e15467
• 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://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20201009-0002/
• https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/1303749848898904067
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4576-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4579-1/
• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/ChangeLog-5.8.8
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=17743798d81238ab13050e8e2833699b54e15467
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/09/msg00025.html

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