The kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, when running on SMP systems, allows local users to cause a denial of service (deadlock) by running the shmat function on an shm at the same time that shmctl is removing that shm (IPC_RMID), which prevents a spinlock from being unlocked.
The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise_linux | Redhat | 3.0 (including) | 3.0 (including) |
Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.