CVE-2014-8481

medium
Published 2014-11-10 ยท Modified 2026-05-06
CVSS v3
โ€”
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
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
โ€”

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 โ€” if you've already worked around this in production โ€” publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

โœš Propose a mitigation on Community โ†’ 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

OSVersionStatusFixed in
suse slesaffected
linux linux-kernelaffected
debian debianbookwormfixed0
debian debianbullseyefixed0
debian debianforkyfixed0
debian debiansidfixed0
debian debiantrixiefixed0

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.