A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's implementation of associative arrays introduced in 3.13. This functionality was backported to the 3.10 kernels in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The flaw involved a null pointer dereference in assoc_array_apply_edit() due to incorrect node-splitting in assoc_array implementation. This affects the keyring key type and thus key addition and link creation operations may cause the kernel to panic.