CVE-2022-0171

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2022-08-26 · updated 2026-10-14
Weakness: CWE-459

Description

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. The existing KVM SEV API has a vulnerability that allows a non-root (host) user-level application to crash the host kernel by creating a confidential guest VM instance in AMD CPU that supports Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

Affected products

Debian Linux: 10.0, 11.0
Linux kernel: before 5.18; 5.18, 5.18-rc1, 5.18-rc2, 5.18-rc3 — fixed in 5.18
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.0, 9.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.18. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-0171
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2038940
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=683412ccf61294d727ead4a73d97397396e69a6b
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/11/msg00001.html
https://www.debian.org/security/2022/dsa-5257
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2022-0171
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2038940
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=683412ccf61294d727ead4a73d97397396e69a6b
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/11/msg00001.html
https://www.debian.org/security/2022/dsa-5257
https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/html/ssa-794697.html

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