What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-10168

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• 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: 2019-08-02 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-250

Description

The virConnectBaselineHypervisorCPU() and virConnectCompareHypervisorCPU() libvirt APIs, 4.x.x before 4.10.1 and 5.x.x before 5.4.1, accept an "emulator" argument to specify the program providing emulation for a domain. Since v1.2.19, libvirt will execute that program to probe the domain's capabilities. Read-only clients could specify an arbitrary path for this argument, causing libvirtd to execute a crafted executable with its own privileges.

Affected products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.0, 8.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 6.0, 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 6.0, 7.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server Aus: 7.6
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server Eus: 7.6
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server Tus: 7.6
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 6.0, 7.0
• libvirt: from 4.0.0 before 4.10.1; from 5.0.0 before 5.4.1 — fixed in 4.10.1, 5.4.1
• RedHat Virtualization: 4.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: libvirt 4.10.1, 5.4.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://access.redhat.com/libvirt-privesc-vulnerabilities
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2019-10168
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-18
• https://access.redhat.com/libvirt-privesc-vulnerabilities
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2019-10168
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202003-18

Get alerted when CVE-2019-10168 or the next vulnerability affects your stack