What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2012-3515

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 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: 2012-11-23 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Qemu, as used in Xen 4.0, 4.1 and possibly other products, when emulating certain devices with a virtual console backend, allows local OS guest users to gain privileges via a crafted escape VT100 sequence that triggers the overwrite of a "device model's address space."

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 10.04, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04
• Debian Linux: 6.0, 7.0
• Opensuse: 11.4, 12.1, 12.2
• QEMU: before 1.2.0 — fixed in 1.2.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 5.0, 6.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Eus: 6.3
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 5.0, 6.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 5.0, 6.0
• RedHat Virtualization: 3.0, 5.0, 6.0
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1: 10-sp4, 11-sp2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 10-sp2, 10-sp3, 10-sp4, 11-sp1, 11-sp2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Software Development Kit: 10-sp4, 11-sp2
• xen: 4.0.0, 4.1.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: QEMU 1.2.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu-stable-0.15.git%3Ba=log
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00001.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00003.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00004.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00005.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00012.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00016.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00017.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00018.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00024.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00026.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-09/msg00027.html

Get alerted when CVE-2012-3515 or the next vulnerability affects your stack