What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-7518

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-07-30 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-250

Description

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel before version 4.12 in the way the KVM module processed the trap flag(TF) bit in EFLAGS during emulation of the syscall instruction, which leads to a debug exception(#DB) being raised in the guest stack. A user/process inside a guest could use this flaw to potentially escalate their privileges inside the guest. Linux guests are not affected by this.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 14.04, 16.04
• Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0
• Linux kernel: before 4.12 — fixed in 4.12
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server Aus: 7.4
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server Eus: 7.4, 7.5
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 7.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.12. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/06/23/5
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/99263
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1038782
• https://access.redhat.com/articles/3290921
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:0395
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:0412
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2017-7518
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3619-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3619-2/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3754-1/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3981
• https://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm/msg151817.html

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