CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2011-1474 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

A locally locally exploitable DOS vulnerability was found in pax-linux versions 2.6.32.33-test79.patch, 2.6.38-test3.patch, and 2.6.37.4-test14.patch. A bad bounds check in arch_get_unmapped_area_topdown triggered by programs doing an mmap after a MAP_GROWSDOWN mmap will create an infinite loop condition without releasing the VM semaphore eventually leading to a system crash.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2019-12-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-835

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel / 2.6.32.33
  • linux / linux_kernel / 2.6.37.4
  • linux / linux_kernel / 2.6.38

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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