CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-47170 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: USB: usbfs: Don't WARN about excessively large memory allocations Syzbot found that the kernel generates a WARNing if the user tries to submit a bulk transfer through usbfs with a buffer that is way too large. This isn't a bug in the kernel; it's merely an invalid request from the user and the usbfs code does handle it correctly. In theory the same thing can happen with async transfers, or with the packet descriptor table for isochronous transfers. To prevent the MM subsystem from complaining about these bad allocation requests, add the __GFP_NOWARN flag to the kmalloc calls for these buffers.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-03-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • linux / linux_kernel / 5.13

Showing 2 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

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