CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-28941 — An issue was discovered in drivers/accessibility/speakup/spk_ttyio.c in the Linux kernel through 5.9.9

Medium CVSS 5.5

An issue was discovered in drivers/accessibility/speakup/spk_ttyio.c in the Linux kernel through 5.9.9. Local attackers on systems with the speakup driver could cause a local denial of service attack, aka CID-d41227544427. This occurs because of an invalid free when the line discipline is used more than once.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-11-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-763

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 32
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0

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

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