CVE-2014-8481

medium

Published 2014-11-10 · Modified 2026-05-06

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CVSS v3

—

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

4.9

Description

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

Linux kernel Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

SUSE Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`0`
sid	Fixed	`0`
forky	Fixed	`0`
bullseye	Fixed	`0`
bookworm	Fixed	`0`

References

CWEs

CWE-399

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.