Vulnerabilities > CVE-2019-20794 - Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in Linux Kernel

047910
CVSS 4.7 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
LOCAL
Attack complexity
HIGH
Privileges required
LOW
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
HIGH
local
high complexity
linux
CWE-772

Summary

An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel 4.18 through 5.6.11 when unprivileged user namespaces are allowed. A user can create their own PID namespace, and mount a FUSE filesystem. Upon interaction with this FUSE filesystem, if the userspace component is terminated via a kill of the PID namespace's pid 1, it will result in a hung task, and resources being permanently locked up until system reboot. This can result in resource exhaustion.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
OS
Linux
842

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • HTTP DoS
    An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.