CVE-2016-4578

medium

Published 2016-05-23 · Modified 2026-05-06

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CVSS v3

5.5

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

6.5

Description

sound/core/timer.c in the Linux kernel through 4.6 does not initialize certain r1 data structures, which allows local users to obtain sensitive information from kernel stack memory via crafted use of the ALSA timer interface, related to the (1) snd_timer_user_ccallback and (2) snd_timer_user_tinterrupt functions.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

55%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-46529 dos linux

wally0813 · 2019-03-11

Linux Kernel 4.4 (Ubuntu 16.04) - 'snd_timer_user_ccallback()' Kernel Pointer Leak

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
sles		affected
linux-kernel		affected
debian	bookworm	fixed	`4.5.5-1`
debian	bullseye	fixed	`4.5.5-1`
debian	forky	fixed	`4.5.5-1`
debian	sid	fixed	`4.5.5-1`
debian	trixie	fixed	`4.5.5-1`
rhel	7.0	affected
ubuntu	12.04	affected
ubuntu	14.04	affected
ubuntu	15.10	affected
ubuntu	16.04	affected
debian	8.0	affected
suse	42.1	affected
suse	13.1	affected

References

CWEs

CWE-200

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.