CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-19065 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.7

A memory leak in the sdma_init() function in drivers/infiniband/hw/hfi1/sdma.c in the Linux kernel before 5.3.9 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by triggering rhashtable_init() failures, aka CID-34b3be18a04e. NOTE: This has been disputed as not a vulnerability because "rhashtable_init() can only fail if it is passed invalid values in the second parameter's struct, but when invoked from sdma_init() that is a pointer to a static const struct, so an attacker could only trigger failure if they could corrupt kernel memory (in which case a small memory leak is not a significant problem).

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.7 (3.1)
Published
2019-11-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 19.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 19.10
  • opensuse / leap / 15.1

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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