CVE-2013-1943

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
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: 2013-07-16 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-20

Description

The KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel before 3.0 does not check whether kernel addresses are specified during allocation of memory slots for use in a guest's physical address space, which allows local users to gain privileges or obtain sensitive information from kernel memory via a crafted application, related to arch/x86/kvm/paging_tmpl.h and virt/kvm/kvm_main.c.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 10.04
Linux kernel: before 3.0 — fixed in 3.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 5.0
RedHat Enterprise Linux Eus: 6.2, 6.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 3.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=fa3d315a4ce2c0891cdde262562e710d95fba19e
http://web.archive.org/web/20130329070349/http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/ChangeLog-3.0
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1939-1
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=950490
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/fa3d315a4ce2c0891cdde262562e710d95fba19e
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=fa3d315a4ce2c0891cdde262562e710d95fba19e
http://web.archive.org/web/20130329070349/http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/ChangeLog-3.0
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1939-1
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=950490
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/fa3d315a4ce2c0891cdde262562e710d95fba19e

Get alerted when CVE-2013-1943 or the next vulnerability affects your stack