CVE-2018-12232: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.9. EPSS: 6.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In net/socket.c in the Linux kernel through 4.17.1, there is a race condition between fchownat and close in cases where they target the same socket file descriptor, related to the sock_close and sockfs_setattr functions. fchownat does not increment the file descriptor reference count, which allows close to set the socket to NULL during fchownat's execution, leading to a NULL pointer dereference and system crash.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: up to and including 4.17.1

Published 2018-06-12. Last modified 2026-06-17.