CVE-2010-4250

medium

Published 2012-06-21 · Modified 2026-04-29

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

5.9

Description

Memory leak in the inotify_init1 function in fs/notify/inotify/inotify_user.c in the Linux kernel before 2.6.37 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via vectors involving failed attempts to create files.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

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-35013 dos linux verified

Vegard Nossum · 2010-11-24

Linux Kernel 2.6.x - 'inotify_init()' Memory Leak Local Denial of Service

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

OS impact

Linux kernel Affected 4 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
2.6.36.3	Affected	—
2.6.36.2	Affected	—
2.6.36.1	Affected	—
—	Affected	—

References

CWEs

CWE-399

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

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