CVE-2016-1981

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: 2016-12-29 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-835

Description

QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) built with the e1000 NIC emulation support is vulnerable to an infinite loop issue. It could occur while processing data via transmit or receive descriptors, provided the initial receive/transmit descriptor head (TDH/RDH) is set outside the allocated descriptor buffer. A privileged user inside guest could use this flaw to crash the QEMU instance resulting in DoS.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 7.0, 8.0
QEMU: through 2.5.1.1

References

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-2585.html
http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3469
http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3470
http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3471
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/01/19/10
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/01/22/1
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/81549
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1298570
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-01/msg03454.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201604-01
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-2585.html
http://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3469

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