CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-46283 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

nf_tables_newset in net/netfilter/nf_tables_api.c in the Linux kernel before 5.12.13 allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and general protection fault) because of the missing initialization for nft_set_elem_expr_alloc. A local user can set a netfilter table expression in their own namespace.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-01-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-665

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

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.