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CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) estimates a 52.2% chance this CVE is exploited in the wild within the next 30 days — higher than 99% of all CVEs. It complements CVSS: a high EPSS on a mid-severity CVE can still be urgent.
Kernel/ptrace.c in Linux kernel mishandles contains an improper privilege management vulnerability that allows local users to obtain root access.
In the Linux kernel before 5.1.17, ptrace_link in kernel/ptrace.c mishandles the recording of the credentials of a process that wants to create a ptrace relationship, which allows local users to obtain root access by leveraging certain scenarios with a parent-child process relationship, where a parent drops privileges and calls execve (potentially allowing control by an attacker). One contributing factor is an object lifetime issue (which can also cause a panic). Another contributing factor is incorrect marking of a ptrace relationship as privileged, which is exploitable through (for example) Polkit's pkexec helper with PTRACE_TRACEME. NOTE: SELinux deny_ptrace might be a usable workaround in some environments.
Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.
No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:
SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.
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