# CVE-2016-10723: Denial of service in n/a

> A local unprivileged user can cause a permanent system lockup by exhausting CPU resources during OOM killer events due to missing yield in the page allocator.

- **Severity:** Medium 5.5 (`CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Any signed-in user
- **Attackable:** Local or same network only
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** Yes
- **Published:** 21 Jun 2018
- **Updated:** 6 Aug 2024
- **Also known as:** BELL-CVE-2016-10723, DEBIAN-CVE-2016-10723, GHSA-425g-hgx9-r6jq, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-12-CVE-2016-10723, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-13-CVE-2016-10723, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-10723

## What is CVE-2016-10723?

CVE-2016-10723 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 21 Jun 2018. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

### Official description

An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.2. Since the page allocator does not yield CPU resources to the owner of the oom_lock mutex, a local unprivileged user can trivially lock up the system forever by wasting CPU resources from the page allocator (e.g., via concurrent page fault events) when the global OOM killer is invoked. NOTE: the software maintainer has not accepted certain proposed patches, in part because of a viewpoint that "the underlying problem is non-trivial to handle.

Weakness: CWE-399

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-10723?

It affects 1 product.


Products: Linux kernel.

## How do I fix CVE-2016-10723?

No fix published yet.

## Is CVE-2016-10723 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-10723 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

- [CVE-2026-53266](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-53266/): Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write (high 8.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2013-6282](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2013-6282/): Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation (high 8.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2022-0185](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2022-0185/): Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow (high 8.4, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2013-2094](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2013-2094/): Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation (high 8.4, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2026-53362](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-53362/): Linux Kernel Unspecified (high 7.8, exploited in the wild)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2016-10723 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2016-10723 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 21 Jun 2018. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Exploitation: There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-10723 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: Linux kernel. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2016-10723/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2016-10723/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2016-10723
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-10723
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2016-10723

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From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2016-10723/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.