CVE-2016-9916

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 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-401

Description

Memory leak in hw/9pfs/9p-proxy.c in QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) allows local privileged guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host memory consumption and possibly QEMU process crash) by leveraging a missing cleanup operation in the proxy backend.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 8.0
QEMU: before 2.8.0; 2.8.0-rc0, 2.8.0-rc1 — fixed in 2.8.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: QEMU 2.8.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=898ae90a44551d25b8e956fd87372d303c82fe68
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/12/06/11
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/12/08/7
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94729
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/09/msg00007.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-11/msg03278.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201701-49
http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=898ae90a44551d25b8e956fd87372d303c82fe68
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/12/06/11
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/12/08/7
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/94729
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/09/msg00007.html

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