CVE-2022-2153

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: yes
Published: 2022-08-31 · updated 2026-10-14
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel’s KVM when attempting to set a SynIC IRQ. This issue makes it possible for a misbehaving VMM to write to SYNIC/STIMER MSRs, causing a NULL pointer dereference. This flaw allows an unprivileged local attacker on the host to issue specific ioctl calls, causing a kernel oops condition that results in a denial of service.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 10.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 36
Linux kernel: before 5.18 — fixed in 5.18
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0

How to fix

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

References

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2069736
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/00b5f37189d24ac3ed46cb7f11742094778c46ce
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/7ec37d1cbe17d8189d9562178d8b29167fe1c31a
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b1e34d325397a33d97d845e312d7cf2a8b646b44
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/10/msg00000.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/11/msg00001.html
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2022/06/22/1
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2069736
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/00b5f37189d24ac3ed46cb7f11742094778c46ce
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/7ec37d1cbe17d8189d9562178d8b29167fe1c31a
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b1e34d325397a33d97d845e312d7cf2a8b646b44
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/10/msg00000.html

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