Skip to content
Fencer Intel
critical 9.8

CVE-2021-46999 in the critical feed json

sctp: do asoc update earlier in sctp_sf_do_dupcook_a

published 2y ago modified 3mo ago also EUVD-2021-33647

cvss
9.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.7%
EPSS 0.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 54%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

sctp: do asoc update earlier in sctp_sf_do_dupcook_a

There's a panic that occurs in a few of envs, the call trace is as below:

[] general protection fault, ... 0x29acd70f1000a: 0000 [#1] SMP PTI [] RIP: 0010:sctp_ulpevent_notify_peer_addr_change+0x4b/0x1fa [sctp] [] sctp_assoc_control_transport+0x1b9/0x210 [sctp] [] sctp_do_8_2_transport_strike.isra.16+0x15c/0x220 [sctp] [] sctp_cmd_interpreter.isra.21+0x1231/0x1a10 [sctp] [] sctp_do_sm+0xc3/0x2a0 [sctp] [] sctp_generate_timeout_event+0x81/0xf0 [sctp]

This is caused by a transport use-after-free issue. When processing a duplicate COOKIE-ECHO chunk in sctp_sf_do_dupcook_a(), both COOKIE-ACK and SHUTDOWN chunks are allocated with the transort from the new asoc. However, later in the sideeffect machine, the old asoc is used to send them out and old asoc's shutdown_last_sent_to is set to the transport that SHUTDOWN chunk attached to in sctp_cmd_setup_t2(), which actually belongs to the new asoc. After the new_asoc is freed and the old asoc T2 timeout, the old asoc's shutdown_last_sent_to that is already freed would be accessed in sctp_sf_t2_timer_expire().

Thanks Alexander and Jere for helping dig into this issue.

To fix it, this patch is to do the asoc update first, then allocate the COOKIE-ACK and SHUTDOWN chunks with the 'updated' old asoc. This would make more sense, as a chunk from an asoc shouldn't be sent out with another asoc. We had fixed quite a few issues caused by this.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 4.19.191, 5.4.120, 5.7, 5.10.38, 5.11.22, 5.12.5, 5.13
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 5.10.38-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2021-46999

  • linux Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-151.157
  • linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-80.90
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-1109.116
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1054.57
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1049.53
  • linux-kvm Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-1097.99
  • linux-kvm Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1044.46
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1055.57

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2021-46999

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Is CVE-2021-46999 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

Check with Fencer

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-2021-46999 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: sctp: do asoc update earlier in sctp_sf_do_dupcook_a

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    affected: no fix available

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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2y ago

Exploit prediction

0.74% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 54% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
Technology feeds

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.