A critical vulnerability that has been identified within the Linux Kernel Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC) module could permit an attacker to acquire administrative permissions if exploited, allowing for remote code execution (RCE), and ultimately a full system take-over. TIPC is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer messaging that enables multiple types of messages depending on the purpose. The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-43267, is described as a heap-overflow, and it exists in the message type “MSG_CRYPTO”, that enable the transfer of cryptographic keys between nodes. The message contains the name of the cryptographic algorithm, the key itself, and the size allocation, minus the header size. The problem with these messages is that there are no validation checks for the size of the message. “This means that an attacker can create a packet with a small body size to allocate heap memory, and then use an arbitrary size in the [key length (keylen)] attribute to write outside the bounds of this location.” This flaw affects Linux Kernel versions between versions 5.10 and 5.15, and users are urged to install the recently released patch immediately.