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Fencer Intel
medium 4.9

CVE-2014-8481 json

The instruction decoder in arch/x86/kvm/emulate.c in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel before 3.18-rc2 does not properly handle invalid…

published 2014-11-10 11 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2014-8318

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 47%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The instruction decoder in arch/x86/kvm/emulate.c in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel before 3.18-rc2 does not properly handle invalid instructions, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and host OS crash) via a crafted application that triggers (1) an improperly fetched instruction or (2) an instruction that occupies too many bytes. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2014-8480.

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-2014-8481 updated 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

0.58% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 47% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a430c9166312e1aa3d80bce32374233bdbfeba32 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

References

Sources

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.