CVE-2021-20261: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 6.4. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A race condition was found in the Linux kernels implementation of the floppy disk drive controller driver software. The impact of this issue is lessened by the fact that the default permissions on the floppy device (/dev/fd0) are restricted to root. If the permissions on the device have changed the impact changes greatly. In the default configuration root (or equivalent) permissions are required to attack this flaw.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: before 4.5 (fixed in 4.5); version 4.5 only
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 7.0 only

Published 2021-03-11. Last modified 2026-06-17.