CVE-2018-16864

An allocation of memory without limits, that could result in the stack clashing with another memory region, was discovered in systemd-journald when a program with long command line arguments calls syslog. A local attacker may use this flaw to crash systemd-journald or escalate privileges.

Mitigation

To increase the time an attacker needs to exploit this flaw you could override the StartLimitInterval= (called StartLimitIntervalSec in newer systemd versions) and StartLimitBurst= settings. In this way the attack may require much longer to be successful.

To edit the journald service use sudo systemctl edit systemd-journald.service and add:

[Service]  
StartLimitInterval=120  
StartLimitBurst=3