CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-25641 — A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's implementation of biovecs in versions before 5.9-rc7

Medium CVSS 5.5

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's implementation of biovecs in versions before 5.9-rc7. A zero-length biovec request issued by the block subsystem could cause the kernel to enter an infinite loop, causing a denial of service. This flaw allows a local attacker with basic privileges to issue requests to a block device, resulting in a denial of service. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 5.9.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • opensuse / leap / 15.1
  • opensuse / leap / 15.2

Showing 6 representative product identities from 15 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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