CVE-2020-10701

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2021-05-27 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-862

Description

A missing authorization flaw was found in the libvirt API responsible for changing the QEMU agent response timeout. This flaw allows read-only connections to adjust the time that libvirt waits for the QEMU guest agent to respond to agent commands. Depending on the timeout value that is set, this flaw can make guest agent commands fail because the agent cannot respond in time. Unprivileged users with a read-only connection could abuse this flaw to set the response timeout for all guest agent messages to zero, potentially leading to a denial of service. This flaw affects libvirt versions before 6.2.0.

Affected products

libvirt: before 6.2.0 — fixed in 6.2.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: libvirt 6.2.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2020-10701 or the next vulnerability affects your stack