Linux Kernel TCP Flaw With 9.8 CVSS Score Affects Ubuntu, Red Hat and Other Distributions

Researchers from Anthropic uncovered a new use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could lead to memory corruption, kernel memory reads, or system crashes. The vulnerability stems from a race condition in the TCP handshake and is fixed by ensuring all other CPUs finish reading the socket options before freeing them. Red Hat and other distros rate the vulnerability less severely because the race condition is complex to exploit.