CVE-2021-38160

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2021-08-07 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-120

Description

In drivers/char/virtio_console.c in the Linux kernel before 5.13.4, data corruption or loss can be triggered by an untrusted device that supplies a buf->len value exceeding the buffer size. NOTE: the vendor indicates that the cited data corruption is not a vulnerability in any existing use case; the length validation was added solely for robustness in the face of anomalous host OS behavior

Affected products

Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0
Linux kernel: from 2.6.24 before 4.4.276; from 4.5 before 4.9.276; from 4.10 before 4.14.240; from 4.15 before 4.19.198; from 4.20 before 5.4.134; from 5.5 before 5.10.52 — fixed in 4.14.240, 4.19.198, 4.4.276, 4.9.276, 5.10.52, 5.12.19
NetApp Element Software: all versions
NetApp Hci Bootstrap Os: all versions
NetApp Hci Management Node: all versions
NetApp Solidfire: all versions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 4.14.240, 4.19.198, 4.4.276, 4.9.276. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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