What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-12904

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.9 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2018-06-27 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

In arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c in the Linux kernel before 4.17.2, when nested virtualization is used, local attackers could cause L1 KVM guests to VMEXIT, potentially allowing privilege escalations and denial of service attacks due to lack of checking of CPL.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04
• Linux kernel: before 4.17.2 — fixed in 4.17.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.17.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=727ba748e110b4de50d142edca9d6a9b7e6111d8
• https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1589
• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.17.2
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/727ba748e110b4de50d142edca9d6a9b7e6111d8
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-2/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/3752-3/
• https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/44944/
• http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=727ba748e110b4de50d142edca9d6a9b7e6111d8
• https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1589
• https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.17.2
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/727ba748e110b4de50d142edca9d6a9b7e6111d8

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