CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-17805 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

The Salsa20 encryption algorithm in the Linux kernel before 4.14.8 does not correctly handle zero-length inputs, allowing a local attacker able to use the AF_ALG-based skcipher interface (CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_SKCIPHER) to cause a denial of service (uninitialized-memory free and kernel crash) or have unspecified other impact by executing a crafted sequence of system calls that use the blkcipher_walk API. Both the generic implementation (crypto/salsa20_generic.c) and x86 implementation (arch/x86/crypto/salsa20_glue.c) of Salsa20 were vulnerable.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2017-12-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • opensuse / leap / 42.2
  • opensuse_project / leap / 42.3
  • suse / linux_enterprise_desktop / 12

Showing 6 representative product identities from 22 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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