CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2016-5195 — Linux Kernel Race Condition Vulnerability
Race condition in mm/gup.c in the Linux kernel 2.x through 4.x before 4.8.3 allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging incorrect handling of a copy-on-write (COW) feature to write to a read-only memory mapping, as exploited in the wild in October 2016, aka "Dirty COW."
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.2 (2.0)
- Published
- 2016-11-10
- CISA KEV
- Known exploited
- Ecosystem
- operating-system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-362
Affected products
- canonical / ubuntu_linux / 12.04
- canonical / ubuntu_linux / 14.04
- canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
- canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.10
- linux / linux_kernel
Showing 5 representative product identities from 41 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.
Matched remediation archetype
Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
- Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
- Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.
Remediate safely
- Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
- Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
- Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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