CVE-2014-7970: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The pivot_root implementation in fs/namespace.c in the Linux kernel through 3.17 does not properly interact with certain locations of a chroot directory, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (mount-tree loop) via . (dot) values in both arguments to the pivot_root system call.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 12.04 only; version 14.04 only
• Linux Linux Kernel: up to and including 3.17
• Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server: version 11.0 only

Published 2014-10-13. Last modified 2026-06-17.