CVE-2018-10853

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-09-11 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-250

Description

A flaw was found in the way Linux kernel KVM hypervisor before 4.18 emulated instructions such as sgdt/sidt/fxsave/fxrstor. It did not check current privilege(CPL) level while emulating unprivileged instructions. An unprivileged guest user/process could use this flaw to potentially escalate privileges inside guest.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04
Debian Linux: 8.0
Linux kernel: before 4.18 — fixed in 4.18

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.18. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-05/msg00043.html
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2029
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2043
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:0036
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:0103
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:0179
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-10853
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=129a72a0d3c8e139a04512325384fe5ac119e74
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=3c9fa24ca7c9c47605672916491f79e8ccacb9e6
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/07/msg00015.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/07/msg00016.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/07/msg00020.html

Get alerted when CVE-2018-10853 or the next vulnerability affects your stack