CVE-2020-10781 Denial of service in kernel
A local attacker can exhaust system memory by repeatedly reading a ZRAM control file, triggering the OOM killer and causing system instability.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2020-10781?
CVE-2020-10781 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 16 Sep 2020. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
A flaw was found in the Linux Kernel before 5.8-rc6 in the ZRAM kernel module, where a user with a local account and the ability to read the /sys/class/zram-control/hot_add file can create ZRAM device nodes in the /dev/ directory. This read allocates kernel memory and is not accounted for a user that triggers the creation of that ZRAM device. With this vulnerability, continually reading the device may consume a large amount of system memory and cause the Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer to activate and terminate random userspace processes, possibly making the system inoperable.
Weakness: CWE-732
Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-10781?
It affects 2 products.
Products include Debian Debian Linux, Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2020-10781?
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-2020-10781 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-10781 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2020-10781, GHSA-93vf-4x6g-q64v, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-10781.