CVE Database›Document archive›CVE-2015-5307

CVE-2015-5307

virt: guest to host DoS by triggering an infinite loop in microcode via #AC exception

Loading…

Severity

Important

Red Hat Product Security

5.2

CVSS 2.0

Review impact separately from score.

Published · November 10, 2015

Updated · November 21, 2025

Description

It was found that the x86 ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) is prone to a denial of service attack inside a virtualized environment in the form of an infinite loop in the microcode due to the way (sequential) delivering of benign exceptions such as #AC (alignment check exception) is handled. A privileged user inside a guest could use this flaw to create denial of service conditions on the host kernel.

Statement

This issue affects the version of the kvm and xen packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This issue does not affect the versions of the kernel package as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.

This issue affects the version of Linux kernel as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7. Future kernel updates for the respective releases may address this issue.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now in Production Phase 3 of the support and maintenance life cycle. Thus it is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/.

CVSS score applicability

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Mitigation

No mitigation is specified in collected source.

CVSS / CWE

CVSS 2.0 · 5.2
AV:A/AC:M/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:C

CWE-835 · Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition ('Infinite Loop')