The 'Indler' Linux Kernel Vulnerability: A 0‑Day Exploit Discovered After 12 Years

Twenty days after the massive "719 Microsoft blue screen" incident, a new critical Linux kernel vulnerability dubbed "indler" was disclosed by kernel expert Zhang Yinkui.

The bug was first noticed as a random kernel oops during testing of the "Youlan" mobile computing platform on Ubuntu 24.04 with kernel 6+, where an out‑of‑bounds memory access produced the long address 0x003a72656c646e69 , which translates to the ASCII string ":reldni".

0:000> .formats 203a72656c646e69
Hex:     203a7265`6c646e69
Decimal: 2322294337798696553
Octal:   0200723446255431067151
Binary:  00100000 00111010 01110010 01100101 01101100 01100100 01101110 01101001
Chars:    :reldni

Using the Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN), the team identified a slab‑out‑of‑bounds write in __memcpy_fromio triggered by the function sysfs_file_ops :

static const struct sysfs_ops *sysfs_file_ops(struct kernfs_node *kn)
{
  struct kobject *kobj = kn->parent->priv;

  if (kn->flags & KERNFS_LOCKDEP)
    lockdep_assert_held(kn);
  return kobj->ktype ? kobj->ktype->sysfs_ops : NULL;
}

The vulnerability has existed since at least 2012 and remains in the mainline Linux kernel, making billions of devices and cloud servers potentially exploitable. It can be triggered from user space via the virtual file system, allowing large‑scale memory overwrites and remote code execution.

According to the researcher, the exploit code originates from Google and could cause damage comparable to the earlier 719 incident, including massive service outages and financial losses.

Mitigation efforts involve coordinated disclosure with security teams, enabling KASAN, and urging users to apply updates promptly.