CVE-2016-6197 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2016-6197?

CVE-2016-6197 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 6 Aug 2016. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

fs/overlayfs/dir.c in the OverlayFS filesystem implementation in the Linux kernel before 4.6 does not properly verify the upper dentry before proceeding with unlink and rename system-call processing, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) via a rename system call that specifies a self-hardlink.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-6197?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Linux kernel, Oracle Linux, Oracle Vm Server.

How do I fix CVE-2016-6197?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

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-2016-6197 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-6197 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 DEBIAN-CVE-2016-6197, GHSA-p6f5-7r7f-h77r, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-6197.