CVE-2012-2121

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.9 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2012-05-17 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-264

Description

The KVM implementation in the Linux kernel before 3.3.4 does not properly manage the relationships between memory slots and the iommu, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (memory leak and host OS crash) by leveraging administrative access to the guest OS to conduct hotunplug and hotplug operations on devices.

Affected products

Linux kernel: through 3.3.3

References

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0676.html
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0743.html
http://secunia.com/advisories/50732
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/ChangeLog-3.3.4
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/04/19/16
http://www.securitytracker.com/id?1027083
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1577-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-2036-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-2037-1
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=814149
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/09ca8e1173bcb12e2a449698c9ae3b86a8a10195
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0676.html

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