CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-10938 — A flaw was found in the Linux kernel present since v4.0-rc1 and through v4.13-rc4

High CVSS 7.1

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel present since v4.0-rc1 and through v4.13-rc4. A crafted network packet sent remotely by an attacker may force the kernel to enter an infinite loop in the cipso_v4_optptr() function in net/ipv4/cipso_ipv4.c leading to a denial-of-service. A certain non-default configuration of LSM (Linux Security Module) and NetLabel should be set up on a system before an attacker could leverage this flaw.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.1 (2.0)
Published
2018-08-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel / 4.0
  • linux / linux_kernel / 4.1

Showing 2 representative product identities from 118 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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