CVE-2017-15102

medium

Published 2017-11-15 · Modified 2026-05-13

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CVSS v3

6.3

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

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

6.3

Description

The tower_probe function in drivers/usb/misc/legousbtower.c in the Linux kernel before 4.8.1 allows local users (who are physically proximate for inserting a crafted USB device) to gain privileges by leveraging a write-what-where condition that occurs after a race condition and a NULL pointer dereference.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

63%

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.

OS impact

Linux kernel Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	`4.8.1`

Red Hat Affected 2 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
6.0	Affected	—
5.0	Affected	—

SUSE Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

Ubuntu Affected 2 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
14.04	Affected	—
12.04	Affected	—

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`4.7.8-1`
sid	Fixed	`4.7.8-1`
forky	Fixed	`4.7.8-1`
bullseye	Fixed	`4.7.8-1`
bookworm	Fixed	`4.7.8-1`

References

CWEs

CWE-476

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

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