The instruction decoder in arch/x86/kvm/emulate.c in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel before 3.18-rc2 lacks intended decoder-table fla…

published 2014-11-10 11 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2014-8317

cvss: 4.9; version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 0.6%; EPSS 0.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 50%
public exploits: 0; none known

The instruction decoder in arch/x86/kvm/emulate.c in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel before 3.18-rc2 lacks intended decoder-table flags for certain RIP-relative instructions, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and host OS crash) via a crafted application.

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2014-8480 updated 2026-11-04 cvss 6.1

kernel: kvm: NULL pointer dereference during rip relative instruction emulation

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 kvm, kernel Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-tools, +3 more Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2 kernel-rt, mrg-rt-release, kernel-rt-trace, kernel-rt-vanilla, kernel-rt-firmware
not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.63% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 50% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

github.com https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/3f6f1480d86bf9fc16c160d803ab1d006e3058d5 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
openwall.com http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2014/10/23/7 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
NVD	2.0	4.9	AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Classification

Weakness

CWE-399 Resource Management Errors

Technology feeds

Linux kernel rss critical rss

References

Sources

CVE List CVE-2014-8480
NVD CVE-2014-8480

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

Summary