CVE-2019-14284

A vulnerability was found in the Linux kernel’s floppy disk driver implementation. A local attacker with access to the floppy disk device file (/dev/fd0 through to /dev/fdN) can create a situation that causes the kernel to divide by zero. This requires two consecutive ioctl calls to be issued. The first ioctl call sets the sector and rate values, and the second ioctl is the call to format the floppy disk to the appropriate values. This flaw can cause the system to divide by zero and panic the host. No media (floppy) is required to be inserted for this attack to work properly.

Mitigation

The kernel module named 'floppy' contains the affected code, this can be blacklisted using the standard blacklisting techniques or disabled in the systems BIOS. See <https://access.redhat.com/solutions/41278&gt; for how to blacklist a kernel module.

Virtualized guest systems can also remove the system from the guests configuration to ensure that the module does not load.