What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-2163: Incorrect Verifier Branch Pruning Logic Leads To Arbitrary Read/Write In Linux Kernel and Lateral Privilege Escalation

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 3.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-09-20 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-682

Description

Incorrect verifier pruning in BPF in Linux Kernel >=5.4 leads to unsafe code paths being incorrectly marked as safe, resulting in arbitrary read/write in kernel memory, lateral privilege escalation, and container escape.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 5.3 before 5.4.242; from 5.5 before 5.10.179; from 5.11 before 5.15.109; from 5.16 before 6.1.26; from 6.2 before 6.2.13 — fixed in 5.10.179, 5.15.109, 5.4.242, 6.1.26, 6.2.13

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.10.179, 5.15.109, 5.4.242, 6.1.26. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=71b547f561247897a0a14f3082730156c0533fed
• https://bughunters.google.com/blog/6303226026131456/a-deep-dive-into-cve-2023-2163-how-we-found-and-fixed-an-ebpf-linux-kernel-vulnerability
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=71b547f561247897a0a14f3082730156c0533fed

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