CVE-2022-49180 LSM: general protection fault in legacy_parse_param

What is CVE-2022-49180?

CVE-2022-49180 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 26 Feb 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

LSM: general protection fault in legacy_parse_param

The usual LSM hook "bail on fail" scheme doesn't work for cases where a security module may return an error code indicating that it does not recognize an input. In this particular case Smack sees a mount option that it recognizes, and returns 0. A call to a BPF hook follows, which returns -ENOPARAM, which confuses the caller because Smack has processed its data.

The SELinux hook incorrectly returns 1 on success. There was a time when this was correct, however the current expectation is that it return 0 on success. This is repaired.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-49180?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2022-49180?

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-2022-49180 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-49180 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-2022-49180, GHSA-pqwr-48cq-xrw8, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-49180.