Memory leak in QEMU

1) Memory leak

EUVDB-ID: #VU32090

Risk: Medium

CVSSv4.0: 4 [CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:H/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/U:Green]

CVE-ID: CVE-2016-9106

CWE-ID: CWE-401 - Missing release of memory after effective lifetime

Exploit availability: No

Description

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.

The vulnerability exists due to memory leak within the v9fs_write function in hw/9pfs/9p.c in QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) allows local guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by leveraging failure to free an IO vector. A remote attacker can perform a denial of service attack.

Mitigation

Cybersecurity Help is currently unaware of any official solution to address this vulnerability.

Vulnerable software versions

QEMU: 3.1.3

CPE2.3

• cpe:2.3:a:qemu:qemu:3.1.3:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

External links

https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commit;h=fdfcc9aeea1492f4b819a24c94dfb678145b1bf9
https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2016-12/msg00140.html
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/10/28/4
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/10/30/10
https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/93964
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/11/msg00038.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-10/msg02623.html

Q & A

Can this vulnerability be exploited remotely?

No. This vulnerability can be exploited locally. The attacker should have authentication credentials and successfully authenticate on the system.

How the attacker can exploit this vulnerability?

The attacker would have to trick the victim to open a a specially crafted file.

The attacker would have to login to the system and perform certain actions in order to exploit this vulnerability.

Is there known malware, which exploits this vulnerability?

No. We are not aware of malware exploiting this vulnerability.