CVE-2021-20317

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. A corrupted timer tree caused the task wakeup to be missing in the timerqueue_add function in lib/timerqueue.c. This flaw allows a local attacker with special user privileges to cause a denial of service, slowing and eventually stopping the system while running OSP.

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=2005258
• https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/pdf/ssa-222547.pdf
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/commit/?id=511885d7061eda3eb1faf3f57dcc936ff75863f1
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/12/msg00012.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/03/msg00012.html
• https://www.debian.org/security/2022/dsa-5096