CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-5856

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Mar 16, 2017 | Modified: Feb 12, 2023
CVSS 3.x
6.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
4.9 MEDIUM
AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C
RedHat/V2
2.3 LOW
AV:A/AC:M/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V3
3 LOW
CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:L
Ubuntu
LOW

Memory leak in the megasas_handle_dcmd function in hw/scsi/megasas.c in QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) allows local guest OS privileged users to cause a denial of service (host memory consumption) via MegaRAID Firmware Interface (MFI) commands with the sglist size set to a value over 2 Gb.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Qemu Qemu * 2.8.1.1 (including)
Qemu Ubuntu trusty *
Qemu Ubuntu upstream *
Qemu Ubuntu xenial *
Qemu Ubuntu yakkety *
Qemu-kvm Ubuntu precise *
Qemu-kvm Ubuntu precise/esm *
Qemu-kvm Ubuntu upstream *

Potential Mitigations

  • Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
  • For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
  • When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
  • To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References