CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-15707 — Gnu Grub2 security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.4

Integer overflows were discovered in the functions grub_cmd_initrd and grub_initrd_init in the efilinux component of GRUB2, as shipped in Debian, Red Hat, and Ubuntu (the functionality is not included in GRUB2 upstream), leading to a heap-based buffer overflow. These could be triggered by an extremely large number of arguments to the initrd command on 32-bit architectures, or a crafted filesystem with very large files on any architecture. An attacker could use this to execute arbitrary code and bypass UEFI Secure Boot restrictions. This issue affects GRUB2 version 2.04 and prior versions.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.4 (3.1)
Published
2020-07-29
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-362, CWE-190

Affected products

  • gnu / grub2
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_atomic_host
  • redhat / openshift_container_platform / 4.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • microsoft / windows_10

Showing 6 representative product identities from 33 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.