CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-5391 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

The Linux kernel, versions 3.9+, is vulnerable to a denial of service attack with low rates of specially modified packets targeting IP fragment re-assembly. An attacker may cause a denial of service condition by sending specially crafted IP fragments. Various vulnerabilities in IP fragmentation have been discovered and fixed over the years. The current vulnerability (CVE-2018-5391) became exploitable in the Linux kernel with the increase of the IP fragment reassembly queue size.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2018-09-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-20

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_desktop / 6.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_desktop / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server / 6.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server_aus / 6.4

Showing 6 representative product identities from 130 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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