Pierluigi Paganini May 13, 2019

Security experts have found a race condition vulnerability (CVE-2019-11815) in Linux Kernel Prior to 5.0.8 that expose systems to remote code execution.

Linux systems based on kernel versions prior to 5.0.8 are affected by a race condition vulnerability leading to a use after free that could be exploited by hackers to get remote code execution.

Attackers can trigger the race condition issue that resides in the rds_tcp_kill_sock TCP/IP implementation in net/rds/tcp.c to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and to execute code remotely on vulnerable Linux machines.

The vulnerability could be exploited by sending specially crafted TCP packets to vulnerable Linux systems.

The vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-11815 received a CVSS v3.0 base score of 8.1, it could be abused by unauthenticated attackers without user interaction.

Anyway, the NIST assigned to the vulnerability an exploitability score of 2.2 and an impact score of 5.9 because it is difficult to exploit.

“An issue was discovered in rds_tcp_kill_sock in net/rds/tcp.c in the Linux kernel before 5.0.8. There is a race condition leading to a use-after-free, related to net namespace cleanup.” reads the description provided by Mitre.

The exploitation of the flaw could allow attackers to access resources, modify any files, and deny access to resources.

The development team of Linux kernel already released a security patch that addressed the CVE-2019-11815 flaw at the end of March. The vulnerability was completely fixed with the release of Linux kernel 5.0.8 version.

Below the security advisories published by the major Linux distributions:

• Debian;
• Red Hat;
• SUSE;
• Ubuntu;

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – CVE-2019-11815, Linux Kernel)

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