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Fencer Intel
medium 6.5

CVE-2018-5244 json

In Xen 4.10, new infrastructure was introduced as part of an overhaul to how MSR emulation happens for guests.

published 2018-01-05 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2018-17026

cvss
6.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 31%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In Xen 4.10, new infrastructure was introduced as part of an overhaul to how MSR emulation happens for guests. Unfortunately, one tracking structure isn't freed when a vcpu is destroyed. This allows guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (host OS memory consumption) by rebooting many times.

Patch / fix

  • xen openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.15.1_01-1.2

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11520-1

  • xen Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +7 more 4.10.0-r1

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2018-5244

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

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-2018-5244 updated cvss 3.8

xen: memory leak with MSR emulation (XSA-253)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 xen
    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

0.37% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 31% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 6.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.9 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

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.