CVE Database›CVE-2015-2877

CVE-2015-2877

Kernel: Cross-VM ASL INtrospection (CAIN)

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Severity

Low

Red Hat Product Security

2.1

CVSS 2.0

Review impact separately from score.

Published · August 5, 2015

Updated · November 22, 2025

Description

Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) in the Linux kernel 2.6.32 through 4.x does not prevent use of a write-timing side channel, which allows guest OS users to defeat the ASLR protection mechanism on other guest OS instances via a Cross-VM ASL INtrospection (CAIN) attack. NOTE: the vendor states "Basically if you care about this attack vector, disable deduplication." Share-until-written approaches for memory conservation among mutually untrusting tenants are inherently detectable for information disclosure, and can be classified as potentially misunderstood behaviors rather than vulnerabilities

Statement

This issue affects the versions of the Linux Kernel as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, 6 and 7. Red Hat Product Security has rated this issue as having Low security impact. Additionally a workaround is available. A future update may address this issue. For additional information, refer to the Issue Severity Classification: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/.

CVSS score applicability

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Mitigation

No mitigation is specified in collected source.

CVSS / CWE

CVSS 2.0 · 2.1
AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N

CWE not specified