CVE-2012-3375 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2012-3375?

CVE-2012-3375 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 3 Oct 2012. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The epoll_ctl system call in fs/eventpoll.c in the Linux kernel before 3.2.24 does not properly handle ELOOP errors in EPOLL_CTL_ADD operations, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (file-descriptor consumption and system crash) via a crafted application that attempts to create a circular epoll dependency. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incorrect fix for CVE-2011-1083.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2012-3375?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2012-3375?

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-2012-3375 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2012-3375 exists.

Public exploit code: 1 Exploit-DB entry.

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 DEBIAN-CVE-2012-3375, GHSA-6f4r-j475-m5hg, RHSA-2012:1061.