CVE-2016-2550

A resource-exhaustion vulnerability was found in the kernel, where an unprivileged process could allocate and accumulate far more file descriptors than the process' limit. A local, unauthenticated user could exploit this flaw by sending file descriptors over a Unix socket and then closing them to keep the process' fd count low, thereby creating kernel-memory or file-descriptors exhaustion (denial of service).

This issue affects the Linux kernel packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This has been rated as having Moderate security impact and is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/.

This issue does not affect the Linux kernel packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7 and MRG-2.

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.