CVE-2016-6198: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The filesystem layer in the Linux kernel before 4.5.5 proceeds with post-rename operations after an OverlayFS file is renamed to a self-hardlink, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) via a rename system call, related to fs/namei.c and fs/open.c.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: up to and including 4.5.4
• Oracle Linux: version 6 only
• Oracle Vm Server: version 3.4 only

Published 2016-08-06. Last modified 2026-06-17.