CVE-2016-5195

HIGH severity · CVSS 7 · CWE-362 · actively exploited (CISA KEV)

7CVSS HIGH ● exploited

🔴 Actively exploited in the wild (CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities). Added to KEV 2022-03-03. US federal agencies must patch by 2022-03-24.

Summary

Race condition in mm/gup.c in the Linux kernel 2.x through 4.x before 4.8.3 allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging incorrect handling of a copy-on-write (COW) feature to write to a read-only memory mapping, as exploited in the wild in October 2016, aka "Dirty COW."

Impact & exploitability

Attack vectorLocal

Attack complexityHigh

Privileges requiredLow

User interactionNone

Confidentiality impactHigh

Integrity impactHigh

Availability impactHigh

Exploit probability (EPSS)94%

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products we track (4)

Palo Alto PAN-OS Ubuntu Debian Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Recommendation

This vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild — patch affected products urgently. Open any affected product above for its exact safe version.

Official patch: http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=19be0eaffa3ac7d8eb6784ad9bdbc7d67ed8e619 ↗

CVE-2016-5195

Summary

Impact & exploitability

Affected products we track (4)

Recommendation

Additional information