CVE-2016-6490

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.4 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: 2016-12-10 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-120

Description

The virtqueue_map_desc function in hw/virtio/virtio.c in QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) allows local guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (infinite loop and QEMU process crash) via a zero length for the descriptor buffer.

Affected products

QEMU: through 2.6.2; 2.7.0-rc0

References

http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=1e7aed70144b4673fc26e73062064b6724795e5f
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/07/28/4
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/07/28/9
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-07/msg06246.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201609-01
http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=1e7aed70144b4673fc26e73062064b6724795e5f
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/07/28/4
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/07/28/9
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-07/msg06246.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201609-01

Get alerted when CVE-2016-6490 or the next vulnerability affects your stack