⚠ Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) Tracker

Description

Kernel/ptrace.c in Linux kernel mishandles contains an improper privilege management vulnerability that allows local users to obtain root access.

Lifecycle Timeline

• 2019-07-04
  Public exploit code

  Metasploit — Linux Polkit pkexec helper PTRACE_TRACEME local root exploit

  Metasploit →
• 2019-07-17
  CVE published 13 days later

  Entered the public CVE record.

  CVE.org →
• 2021-12-10
  Added to CISA KEV 2.4 years later

  Listed as known exploited, which starts the federal remediation clock.

  CISA KEV →
• 2022-06-10
  Federal remediation due 6 months later

  Deadline for federal civilian agencies under BOD 22-01 — now passed.

  CISA KEV
• not recorded
  EPSS flags exploitation risk

  Already at 52.9% when EPSS history begins (2021-12-11), so the moment it was first flagged predates the record.
• not recorded
  First national advisory

  No tracked government advisory analyses this CVE. Routine KEV catalog-addition alerts do not count here.
• not recorded
  Vendor fix published

  No dated vendor fix. Only Microsoft publishes a machine-readable release date; other vendors state a fixed version without one.

Each milestone comes from a different source, so gaps between them are gaps in what those sources publish, not evidence that nothing happened. EPSS history for this CVE holds 262 points from 2021-12-11, tracked daily from 2026-09-09; earlier points are weekly, which dates a spike to within a week. Peak probability 84.4% on 2025-03-29.

Published Applicability

Check whether a specific version is affected →

What each source publishes about which product versions carry this vulnerability, kept as written rather than merged. Absence here means no source has published applicability data, not that nothing is affected.

Research & News Coverage

Articles from monitored vendor research blogs and security news feeds that specifically mention this CVE. Coverage begins when feed monitoring started; earlier articles are not indexed.

Detection & Exploitation

Coverage across public collections only: Nuclei and OpenVAS NVT (scan); Snort and Suricata ET Open (network); Sigma and YARA (host/SIEM); Metasploit, Exploit-DB and public GitHub repositories (exploit). Absence here means nothing public was found, not that detection is impossible.
GitHub PoC repositories are collected automatically by PoC-in-GitHub (CC0) and are not vetted: some are fakes and some are malware. Treat them as evidence that code was published, not as code to run.
OpenVAS coverage derives from the Greenbone Community Feed, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0; its individual Vulnerability Tests are licensed GNU GPL v2.

Distribution Status

Where the distribution has shipped a fix, and in which version. Green means the release has resolved it, amber that it is still open. Data from the Debian Security Tracker, used under Debian's MIT / GPLv2+ terms. Debian is upstream of several other distributions, so a fix here often precedes theirs.

CISA Assessment (Vulnrichment / SSVC)

KEV Catalog Status

Listed By

Weaponization Timeline — Offensive & Testing Tools

No exploit-tool sightings recorded for this CVE.

Evidence tiers are explained on the About page — a merged Metasploit module is far stronger evidence than a distro package mention.

External References

CVE.org record → NVD entry → CISA KEV catalog → FortiGuard Labs → Rapid7 AttackerKB →