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NULL Pointer Dereference

CVE-2021-47316

Medium
5.5/10

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: nfsd: fix NULL dereference in nfs3svc_encode_getaclres In error cases the dentry may be NULL. Before 20798dfe249a, the encoder also checked dentry and d_really_is_positive(dentry), but that looks like overkill to me--zero status should be enough to guarantee a positive dentry. This isn't the first time we've seen an error-case NULL dereference hidden in the initialization of a local variable in an xdr encoder. But I went back through the other recent rewrites and didn't spot any similar bugs.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-476 - NULL Pointer Dereference

A NULL pointer dereference occurs when the application dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid, but is NULL, typically causing a crash or exit.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published