CVE-2021-20265

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: 2021-03-10 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

A flaw was found in the way memory resources were freed in the unix_stream_recvmsg function in the Linux kernel when a signal was pending. This flaw allows an unprivileged local user to crash the system by exhausting available memory. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Affected products

Linux kernel: all versions
Oracle Tekelec Platform Distribution: from 7.4.0 through 7.7.1

References

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1908827
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=fa0dc04df259ba2df3ce1920e9690c7842f8fa4b
https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuoct2021.html
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1908827
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=fa0dc04df259ba2df3ce1920e9690c7842f8fa4b
https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuoct2021.html

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