A flaw was found in the Linux kernels Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP). A missing lock when clearing sk_user_data can lead to a race condition and NULL pointer dereference. A local user could use this flaw to potentially crash the system causing a denial of service.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layer_2_tunneling_protocol | Linux | * | 6.0 (excluding) |
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.