CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-9373

Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Published: Jun 16, 2017 | Modified: Apr 20, 2025
CVSS 3.x
5.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
1.9 LOW
AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
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
root.io logo minimus.io logo echo.ai logo

Memory leak in QEMU (aka Quick Emulator), when built with IDE AHCI Emulation support, allows local guest OS privileged users to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by repeatedly hot-unplugging the AHCI device.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.

Affected Software

NameVendorStart VersionEnd Version
QemuQemu*2.8.1.1 (including)
QemuQemu2.9.0-rc0 (including)2.9.0-rc0 (including)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.0 (Juno) for RHEL 7RedHatqemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.9.0-10.el7*
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7.0 (Kilo) for RHEL 7RedHatqemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.9.0-10.el7*
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10.0 (Newton)RedHatqemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.9.0-10.el7*
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11.0 (Ocata)RedHatqemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.9.0-10.el7*
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8.0 (Liberty)RedHatqemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.9.0-10.el7*
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9.0 (Mitaka)RedHatqemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.9.0-10.el7*
Red Hat Virtualization 4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7RedHatqemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.9.0-14.el7*
QemuUbuntuesm-infra-legacy/trusty*
QemuUbuntuesm-infra/xenial*
QemuUbuntutrusty*
QemuUbuntutrusty/esm*
QemuUbuntuxenial*
QemuUbuntuyakkety*
QemuUbuntuzesty*
Qemu-kvmUbuntuprecise/esm*

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