CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-3679 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

A lack of CPU resource in the Linux kernel tracing module functionality in versions prior to 5.14-rc3 was found in the way user uses trace ring buffer in a specific way. Only privileged local users (with CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability) could use this flaw to starve the resources causing denial of service.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-835

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 5.14
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

Showing 5 representative product identities from 7 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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