Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [4.7,4.9.191)[4.14,4.14.141)[4.19,4.19.69)[5.2,5.2.11)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
13.46% (94th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-3005644
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed25 Aug 2019
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 25 Aug 2019

CVE-2019-15538  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 4.9.191, 4.14.141, 4.19.69, 5.2.11 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). An issue was discovered in xfs_setattr_nonsize in fs/xfs/xfs_iops.c in the Linux kernel through 5.2.9. XFS partially wedges when a chgrp fails on account of being out of disk quota. xfs_setattr_nonsize is failing to unlock the ILOCK after the xfs_qm_vop_chown_reserve call fails. This is primarily a local DoS attack vector, but it might result as well in remote DoS if the XFS filesystem is exported for instance via NFS.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1