CVE-2018-10021

[Disputed] A memory leak was identified in the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) implementation in the Linux kernel, specifically in the libsas component. This issue occurs when ATA devices in error handling (EH) fail to properly pass commands to libata, causing ATA queued commands (qc) to leak and triggering warnings. If enough ATA qcs are leaked, it can lead to allocation failures, causing I/O to block indefinitely, potentially resulting in a denial of service (DoS) due to memory exhaustion. However, this issue has been disputed, with claims that the vulnerability only arises under specific failure conditions that require physical proximity, such as unplugging SAS Host Bus Adapter cables.

This issue has been fully addressed with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and later, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. As a result, no versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9 are currently affected by this vulnerability.

Furthermore, Red Hat Product Security does not classify this as a security vulnerability. Given that the relevance of this vulnerability has been disputed by a third party vendors. The argument is that the issue can only be triggered under very specific conditions—namely, by physically proximate attackers who manually unplug SAS Host Bus Adapter cables. As a result, the vulnerability is not considered a significant security risk, since it requires direct physical access and cannot be exploited remotely. Given these constraints, this flaw is not classified as a security vulnerability, but rather a system reliability issue in highly specific, physical environments.

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 for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.