CVE-2017-5972 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2017-5972?

CVE-2017-5972 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 14 Feb 2017. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The TCP stack in the Linux kernel 3.x does not properly implement a SYN cookie protection mechanism for the case of a fast network connection, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) by sending many TCP SYN packets, as demonstrated by an attack against the kernel-3.10.0 package in CentOS Linux 7. NOTE: third parties have been unable to discern any relationship between the GitHub Engineering finding and the Trigemini.c attack code.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2017-5972?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2017-5972?

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-2017-5972 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2017-5972 in the wild and no public exploit code.

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-2017-5972, GHSA-f37r-2v2w-7r8w, UBUNTU-CVE-2017-5972.