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

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, ranked at the 6th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

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

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2025-38217Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2026-53250Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2026-31678Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2023-52478Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2025-22060Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2025-21746Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2025-21958Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2024-50234Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2024-43882Same product: Linux Linux Kernel
CVE-2026-52991Same 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

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-367

Timestamps meeting UTC or offset standards help identify TOCTOU issues through precise chronological reconstruction of check/use operations.

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.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

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

none

Reliable, synchronized time across systems narrows the exploitable window in which a resource state can change between a security check and its use.

References