What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2009-1242

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.9 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2009-04-06 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

The vmx_set_msr function in arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c in the VMX implementation in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel before 2.6.29.1 on the i386 platform allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (OOPS) by setting the EFER_LME (aka "Long mode enable") bit in the Extended Feature Enable Register (EFER) model-specific register, which is specific to the x86_64 platform.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04
• Debian Linux: 4.0, 5.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 10
• Linux kernel: before 2.6.29.1 — fixed in 2.6.29.1
• Opensuse: 11.0, 11.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 2.6.29.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=16175a796d061833aacfbd9672235f2d2725df65
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2009-06/msg00001.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2009-06/msg00002.html
• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2009/04/01/3
• http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/15549/
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34478
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34981
• http://secunia.com/advisories/35120
• http://secunia.com/advisories/35121
• http://secunia.com/advisories/35226
• http://secunia.com/advisories/35387
• http://secunia.com/advisories/35394

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