CVE-2020-12656

unknown
Published — · Modified —
CVSS v3
CVSS v2
VIR risk

Description

gss_mech_free in net/sunrpc/auth_gss/gss_mech_switch.c in the rpcsec_gss_krb5 implementation in the Linux kernel through 5.6.10 lacks certain domain_release calls, leading to a memory leak. Note: This was disputed with the assertion that the issue does not grant any access not already available. It is a problem that on unloading a specific kernel module some memory is leaked, but loading kernel modules is a privileged operation. A user could also write a kernel module to consume any amount of memory they like and load that replicating the effect of this bug

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: debian — https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2020-12656

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: suse — https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2020-12656.html

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
suse slesaffected
debian debianbookwormfixed5.7.6-1
debian debianbullseyefixed5.7.6-1
debian debianforkyfixed5.7.6-1
debian debiansidfixed5.7.6-1
debian debiantrixiefixed5.7.6-1

References

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