What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-5088: Qemu: improper ide controller reset can lead to mbr overwrite

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.0 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-11-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-821

Description

A bug in QEMU could cause a guest I/O operation otherwise addressed to an arbitrary disk offset to be targeted to offset 0 instead (potentially overwriting the VM's boot code). This could be used, for example, by L2 guests with a virtual disk (vdiskL2) stored on a virtual disk of an L1 (vdiskL1) hypervisor to read and/or write data to LBA 0 of vdiskL1, potentially gaining control of L1 at its next reboot.

Affected products

• QEMU: before 8.2.0 — fixed in 8.2.0
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.0, 9.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: QEMU 8.2.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:2135
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:2962
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-5088
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2247283
• https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230921160712.99521-1-simon.rowe@nutanix.com/T/
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:2135
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:2962
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-5088
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2247283
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/03/msg00012.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/04/msg00042.html
• https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230921160712.99521-1-simon.rowe@nutanix.com/T/

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