CVE-2020-14385: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel before 5.9-rc4. A failure of the file system metadata validator in XFS can cause an inode with a valid, user-creatable extended attribute to be flagged as corrupt. This can lead to the filesystem being shutdown, or otherwise rendered inaccessible until it is remounted, leading to a denial of service. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 18.04 only; version 20.04 only
• Debian Debian Linux: version 9.0 only
• Linux Linux Kernel: before 5.9.0 (fixed in 5.9.0); version 5.9.0 only

Published 2020-09-15. Last modified 2026-06-17.