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Fencer Vulns
no cvss —

CVE-2023-53987 json

ping: Fix potentail NULL deref for /proc/net/icmp.

published 2025-12-24 10 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2025-205172

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 9%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

ping: Fix potentail NULL deref for /proc/net/icmp.

After commit dbca1596bbb0 ("ping: convert to RCU lookups, get rid of rwlock"), we use RCU for ping sockets, but we should use spinlock for /proc/net/icmp to avoid a potential NULL deref mentioned in the previous patch.

Let's go back to using spinlock there.

Note we can convert ping sockets to use hlist instead of hlist_nulls because we do not use SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU for ping sockets.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.20, 6.1.24, 6.2.11, 6.3
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 6.1.25-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2023-53987

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-2023-53987 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: Linux kernel: Denial of Service via NULL dereference in ping socket handling

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 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 “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    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

0.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 9% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

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.