An excessive resource consumption flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel's networking subsystem processed TCP segments. If the Maximum Segment Size (MSS) of a TCP connection was set to low values, such as 48 bytes, it can leave as little as 8 bytes for the user data, which significantly increases the Linux kernel's resource (CPU, Memory, and Bandwidth) utilization. A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause a denial of service (DoS) by repeatedly sending network traffic on a TCP connection with low TCP MSS.