CVE-2018-16864 Denial of service in systemd

What is CVE-2018-16864?

CVE-2018-16864 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 11 Jan 2019. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An allocation of memory without limits, that could result in the stack clashing with another memory region, was discovered in systemd-journald when a program with long command line arguments calls syslog. A local attacker may use this flaw to crash systemd-journald or escalate his privileges. Versions through v240 are vulnerable.

Weakness: CWE-770

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-16864?

It affects 11 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Oracle Communications Session Border Controller, Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker, Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Redhat Enterprise Linux Server and 5 more.

How do I fix CVE-2018-16864?

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-2018-16864 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-16864 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-16864, GHSA-h53q-m6g5-wfq9, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-16864.