CVE-2019-8980 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2019-8980?

CVE-2019-8980 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 21 Feb 2019. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A memory leak in the kernel_read_file function in fs/exec.c in the Linux kernel through 4.20.11 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by triggering vfs_read failures.

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2019-8980?

It affects 4 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux, Linux kernel, Opensuse Leap.

How do I fix CVE-2019-8980?

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-2019-8980 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2019-8980 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-2019-8980, GHSA-2xr8-28cv-28vv, UBUNTU-CVE-2019-8980.