CVE-2009-4272 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2009-4272?

CVE-2009-4272 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 27 Jan 2010. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A certain Red Hat patch for net/ipv4/route.c in the Linux kernel 2.6.18 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (deadlock) via crafted packets that force collisions in the IPv4 routing hash table, and trigger a routing "emergency" in which a hash chain is too long. NOTE: this is related to an issue in the Linux kernel before 2.6.31, when the kernel routing cache is disabled, involving an uninitialized pointer and a panic.

Weakness: CWE-667

Which versions are affected by CVE-2009-4272?

It affects 6 products.

Products include Linux kernel, Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Redhat Enterprise Linux Eus, Redhat Enterprise Linux Server, Redhat Enterprise Linux Workstation, Redhat Virtualization.

How do I fix CVE-2009-4272?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2009-4272 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2009-4272 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-w5pr-8rvr-3pcp.