CVE-2020-35508

A flaw possibility of race condition and incorrect initialization of the process id was found in the Linux kernel child/parent process identification handling while filtering signal handlers. A local attacker is able to abuse this flaw to bypass checks to send any signal to a privileged process.

Weakness

The product does not initialize or incorrectly initializes a resource, which might leave the resource in an unexpected state when it is accessed or used.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use a language that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
• For example, in Java, if the programmer does not explicitly initialize a variable, then the code could produce a compile-time error (if the variable is local) or automatically initialize the variable to the default value for the variable’s type. In Perl, if explicit initialization is not performed, then a default value of undef is assigned, which is interpreted as 0, false, or an equivalent value depending on the context in which the variable is accessed.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/29.html

References

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1902724
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b4e00444cab4c3f3fec876dc0cccc8cbb0d1a948
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20210513-0006/