CVE intelligence

CVE-2024-49940

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Oct 21, 2024Sources checked Oct 24, 2026

5.5MEDIUMCVSS out of 10

What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2024-49940 and is rated Medium severity with a CVSS score of 5.5. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog

EPSS0.3%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability

Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field

Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships

Overview

What is CVE-2024-49940?

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

l2tp: prevent possible tunnel refcount underflow

When a session is created, it sets a backpointer to its tunnel. When the session refcount drops to 0, l2tp_session_free drops the tunnel refcount if session->tunnel is non-NULL.

However, session->tunnel is set in l2tp_session_create, before the tunnel refcount is incremented by l2tp_session_register, which leaves a small window where session->tunnel is non-NULL when the tunnel refcount hasn't been bumped.

Moving the assignment to l2tp_session_register is trivial but l2tp_session_create calls l2tp_session_set_header_len which uses session->tunnel to get the tunnel's encap. Add an encap arg to l2tp_session_set_header_len to avoid using session->tunnel.

If l2tpv3 sessions have colliding IDs, it is possible for l2tp_v3_session_get to race with l2tp_session_register and fetch a session which doesn't yet have session->tunnel set. Add a check for this case.

Source: NVD