Cyber Resilience

CVE-2024-50220

Race Condition in Linux Kernel 6.8 – 6.11.7

Published
09 November 2024
Modified
26 September 2025
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 4.7
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0017 6th percentile
Risk Priority 35 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2024-50220 is a medium-severity Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition (CWE-367) vulnerability in Linux Linux Kernel. Its CVSS base score is 4.7 (Medium).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Path Interception (T1034); ranked at the 6th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to AC-25 (Reference Monitor) and AC-3 (Access Enforcement) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: fork: do not invoke uffd on fork if error occurs Patch series "fork: do not expose incomplete mm on fork". During fork we may place the virtual memory address space…

more

into an inconsistent state before the fork operation is complete. In addition, we may encounter an error during the fork operation that indicates that the virtual memory address space is invalidated. As a result, we should not be exposing it in any way to external machinery that might interact with the mm or VMAs, machinery that is not designed to deal with incomplete state. We specifically update the fork logic to defer khugepaged and ksm to the end of the operation and only to be invoked if no error arose, and disallow uffd from observing fork events should an error have occurred. This patch (of 2): Currently on fork we expose the virtual address space of a process to userland unconditionally if uffd is registered in VMAs, regardless of whether an error arose in the fork. This is performed in dup_userfaultfd_complete() which is invoked unconditionally, and performs two duties - invoking registered handlers for the UFFD_EVENT_FORK event via dup_fctx(), and clearing down userfaultfd_fork_ctx objects established in dup_userfaultfd(). This is problematic, because the virtual address space may not yet be correctly initialised if an error arose. The change in commit d24062914837 ("fork: use __mt_dup() to duplicate maple tree in dup_mmap()") makes this more pertinent as we may be in a state where entries in the maple tree are not yet consistent. We address this by, on fork error, ensuring that we roll back state that we would otherwise expect to clean up through the event being handled by userland and perform the memory freeing duty otherwise performed by dup_userfaultfd_complete(). We do this by implementing a new function, dup_userfaultfd_fail(), which performs the same loop, only decrementing reference counts. Note that we perform mmgrab() on the parent and child mm's, however userfaultfd_ctx_put() will mmdrop() this once the reference count drops to zero, so we will avoid memory leaks correctly here.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1034 Path Interception Persistence
**This technique has been deprecated.
T1548 Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism Privilege Escalation
Adversaries may circumvent mechanisms designed to control privilege elevation to gain higher-level permissions.
T1574 Hijack Execution Flow Stealth
Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by hijacking the way operating systems run programs.
Derived from this CVE’s CWE(s) via the direct CWE→ATT&CK cross-walk.

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CVE-2025-22060Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2025-38217Same product: Linux Linux Kernel

Affected Assets

linux
linux kernel
6.12 · 6.8 — 6.11.7

Mitigating Controls

Control response

Prevent
Stop it (NIST 800-53)

—

Detect
Catch it (NIST detect / respond)

—

Harden
Shrink the surface (DISA STIG)

—

Validate
Prove the fix (OWASP ASVS)
  • V15.4.2
  • V17.2.6

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

A reference monitor that is always invoked and analyzable structurally eliminates the non-atomic check-then-use pattern underlying TOCTOU.

Access enforcement that performs an atomic check-and-use decision directly stops the window in which a TOCTOU race can be exploited.

Process isolation limits the blast radius of a successful TOCTOU exploitation but does not remove the race itself.

Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

PR.PS-06 mostly match
prevents

Secure SDLC practices directly include coding standards and reviews that prevent TOCTOU race conditions.

References