CVE-2017-1000255

Published Oct 30, 2017

Last updated 7 years ago

Overview

Description
On Linux running on PowerPC hardware (Power8 or later) a user process can craft a signal frame and then do a sigreturn so that the kernel will take an exception (interrupt), and use the r1 value *from the signal frame* as the kernel stack pointer. As part of the exception entry the content of the signal frame is written to the kernel stack, allowing an attacker to overwrite arbitrary locations with arbitrary values. The exception handling does produce an oops, and a panic if panic_on_oops=1, but only after kernel memory has been over written. This flaw was introduced in commit: "5d176f751ee3 (powerpc: tm: Enable transactional memory (TM) lazily for userspace)" which was merged upstream into v4.9-rc1. Please note that kernels built with CONFIG_PPC_TRANSACTIONAL_MEM=n are not vulnerable.
Source
cve@mitre.org
NVD status
Modified

Risk scores

CVSS 3.0

Type
Primary
Base score
5.5
Impact score
3.6
Exploitability score
1.8
Vector string
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Severity
MEDIUM

CVSS 2.0

Type
Primary
Base score
6.6
Impact score
9.2
Exploitability score
3.9
Vector string
AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:C/A:C

Weaknesses

nvd@nist.gov
CWE-787

Social media

Hype score
Not currently trending

Configurations