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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2016-6831 json

The "process-execute" and "process-spawn" procedures did not free memory correctly when the execve() call failed, resulting in a memory lea…

published 2017-01-10 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-7716

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.8%
EPSS 1.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 78%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The "process-execute" and "process-spawn" procedures did not free memory correctly when the execve() call failed, resulting in a memory leak. This could be abused by an attacker to cause resource exhaustion or a denial of service. This affects all releases of CHICKEN up to and including 4.11 (it will be fixed in 4.12 and 5.0, which are not yet released).

Patch / fix

  • chicken Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.12.0-0.2

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-6831

  • chicken Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +16 more 4.11.1-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2016-6831

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2016-6831 updated cvss 4.4

chicken: Buffer overflow and a memory leak in the POSIX unit's procedures process-execute and process-spawn

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.76% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 78% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.