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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.7

CVE-2009-1046 json

The console selection feature in the Linux kernel 2.6.28 before 2.6.28.4, 2.6.25, and possibly earlier versions, when the UTF-8 console is…

published 2009-03-23 17 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2009-1047

cvss
4.7
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.8%
EPSS 0.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 56%
public exploits
1
Exploit-DB

Summary

The console selection feature in the Linux kernel 2.6.28 before 2.6.28.4, 2.6.25, and possibly earlier versions, when the UTF-8 console is used, allows physically proximate attackers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) by selecting a small number of 3-byte UTF-8 characters, which triggers an "off-by-two memory error." NOTE: it is not clear whether this issue crosses privilege boundaries.

Patch / fix

  • kernel-rt enterprise mrg 1 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt
  • kernel-rt-trace enterprise mrg 1 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt
  • kernel-rt-vanilla enterprise mrg 1 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt
  • kernel-rt-debuginfo-common enterprise mrg 1 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt

red hat advisories RHSA-2009:0451

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-2009-1046 updated cvss 6.9

kernel: utf8 selection memory corruption

  • Red Hat MRG Realtime for RHEL 5 Server kernel-rt 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt, kernel-rt-trace 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt, kernel-rt-vanilla 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt, kernel-rt-debuginfo-common 2.6.24.7-111.el5rt
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2009:0451

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

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. First public exploit (EDB-9083)

Exploit prediction

0.78% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 56% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • EDB-9083 Linux Kernel 2.6.24_16-23/2.6.27_7-10/2.6.28.3 (Ubuntu 8.04/8.10 / Fedora Core 10 x86-64) - 'set_selection()' UTF-8 Off-by-One Privilege Escalation local, 2009-07-09

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 4.7 AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-399 Resource Management Errors
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns 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.