CVE-2017-1000253: Linux Kernel PIE Stack Buffer Corruption Vulnerability

High severity, CVSS 7.8. Actively exploited: in CISA KEV since 2024-09-09. EPSS: 10.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Linux distributions that have not patched their long-term kernels with https://git.kernel.org/linus/a87938b2e246b81b4fb713edb371a9fa3c5c3c86 (committed on April 14, 2015). This kernel vulnerability was fixed in April 2015 by commit a87938b2e246b81b4fb713edb371a9fa3c5c3c86 (backported to Linux 3.10.77 in May 2015), but it was not recognized as a security threat. With CONFIG_ARCH_BINFMT_ELF_RANDOMIZE_PIE enabled, and a normal top-down address allocation strategy, load_elf_binary() will attempt to map a PIE binary into an address range immediately below mm->mmap_base. Unfortunately, load_elf_ binary() does not take account of the need to allocate sufficient space for the entire binary which means that, while the first PT_LOAD segment is mapped below mm->mmap_base, the subsequent PT_LOAD segment(s) end up being mapped above mm->mmap_base into the are that is supposed to be the "gap" between the stack and the binary.

Affected products

• Centos Centos: version 6.0 only; version 6.1 only; version 6.2 only; version 6.3 only; version 6.4 only; version 6.5 only; …
• Linux Linux Kernel: from 2.6.25, before 3.2.70 (fixed in 3.2.70); from 3.3, before 3.4.109 (fixed in 3.4.109); from 3.5, before 3.10.77 (fixed in 3.10.77); from 3.11, before 3.12.43 (fixed in 3.12.43); from 3.13, before 3.14.41 (fixed in 3.14.41); from 3.15, before 3.16.35 (fixed in 3.16.35); …
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 6.0 only; version 6.1 only; version 6.2 only; version 6.3 only; version 6.4 only; version 6.5 only; …

Published 2017-10-05. Last modified 2026-06-17.