CVE-2018-12232 Race condition in n/a

What is CVE-2018-12232?

CVE-2018-12232 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 12 Jun 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

In net/socket.c in the Linux kernel through 4.17.1, there is a race condition between fchownat and close in cases where they target the same socket file descriptor, related to the sock_close and sockfs_setattr functions. fchownat does not increment the file descriptor reference count, which allows close to set the socket to NULL during fchownat's execution, leading to a NULL pointer dereference and system crash.

Weakness: CWE-362

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-12232?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2018-12232?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2018-12232 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-12232 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-2018-12232, GHSA-wg55-v4qx-w8g3, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-12232.