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Fencer Vulns
high 7.2

CVE-2009-1238 json

Race condition in the HFS vfs sysctl interface in XNU 1228.8.20 and earlier on Apple Mac OS X 10.5.6 and earlier allows local users to caus…

published 2009-04-02 17 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2009-1237

cvss
7.2
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.6%
EPSS 0.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 50%
public exploits
1
Exploit-DB

Summary

Race condition in the HFS vfs sysctl interface in XNU 1228.8.20 and earlier on Apple Mac OS X 10.5.6 and earlier allows local users to cause a denial of service (kernel memory corruption) by simultaneously executing the same HFS_SET_PKG_EXTENSIONS code path in multiple threads, which is problematic because of lack of mutex locking for an unspecified global variable.

Timeline

  1. First public exploit (EDB-8265)
  2. Published

Exploit prediction

0.62% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 50% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • EDB-8265 Apple Mac OSX xnu 1228.x - 'vfssysctl' Local Kernel Denial of Service (PoC) dos, 2009-03-23
  • securityfocus.com http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34202 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • digit-labs.org http://www.digit-labs.org/files/exploits/xnu-vfssysctl-dos.c referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 7.2 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-362 Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization

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.