CVE-2020-10690

Published: 8 May 2020

There is a use-after-free in kernel versions before 5.5 due to a race condition between the release of ptp_clock and cdev while resource deallocation. When a (high privileged) process allocates a ptp device file (like /dev/ptpX) and voluntarily goes to sleep. During this time if the underlying device is removed, it can cause an exploitable condition as the process wakes up to terminate and clean all attached files. The system crashes due to the cdev structure being invalid (as already freed) which is pointed to by the inode.

From the Ubuntu Security Team

It was discovered that a race condition existed in the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) implementation in the Linux kernel, leading to a use-after- free vulnerability. A local attacker could possibly use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code.

Status

Severity score breakdown

References

• https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-10690
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2020-10690
• https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20191125125342.6189-1-vdronov@redhat.com/T/#u
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-4419-1
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian