CVE-2016-6198 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2016-6198?

CVE-2016-6198 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

The filesystem layer in the Linux kernel before 4.5.5 proceeds with post-rename operations after an OverlayFS file is renamed to a self-hardlink, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) via a rename system call, related to fs/namei.c and fs/open.c.

Weakness: CWE-284

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-6198?

It affects 3 products.

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

How do I fix CVE-2016-6198?

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-2016-6198 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-6198 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-2016-6198, GHSA-pvqg-4394-gpjv, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-6198.