CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2015-8952 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

The mbcache feature in the ext2 and ext4 filesystem implementations in the Linux kernel before 4.6 mishandles xattr block caching, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (soft lockup) via filesystem operations in environments that use many attributes, as demonstrated by Ceph and Samba.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.0)
Published
2016-10-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-19

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

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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