CVE-2017-1000255 - CVE House
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Status published Medium CVE-2017-1000255

On Linux running on PowerPC hardware (Power8 or later) a...

Vulnerability Description

On Linux running on PowerPC hardware (Power8 or later) a user process can craft a signal frame and then do a sigreturn so that the kernel will take an exception (interrupt), and use the r1 value *from the signal frame* as the kernel stack pointer. As part of the exception entry the content of the signal frame is written to the kernel stack, allowing an attacker to overwrite arbitrary locations with arbitrary values. The exception handling does produce an oops, and a panic if panic_on_oops=1, but only after kernel memory has been over written. This flaw was introduced in commit: "5d176f751ee3 (powerpc: tm: Enable transactional memory (TM) lazily for userspace)" which was merged upstream into v4.9-rc1. Please note that kernels built with CONFIG_PPC_TRANSACTIONAL_MEM=n are not vulnerable.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

linux kernel
Vulnerable Versions:
Unknown

Timeline

Official Publish: October 30th, 2017
Last Modified: August 5th, 2024
Added to House: July 20th, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.