CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-12768 — An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel before 5.6

Medium CVSS 5.5

An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel before 5.6. svm_cpu_uninit in arch/x86/kvm/svm.c has a memory leak, aka CID-d80b64ff297e. NOTE: third parties dispute this issue because it's a one-time leak at the boot, the size is negligible, and it can't be triggered at will

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-05-09
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 19.10
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 20.04
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

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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