A DMA reentrancy issue was found in the USB EHCI controller emulation of QEMU. EHCI does not verify if the Buffer Pointer overlaps with its MMIO region when it transfers the USB packets. Crafted content may be written to the controllers registers and trigger undesirable actions (such as reset) while the device is still transferring packets. This can ultimately lead to a use-after-free issue. A malicious guest could use this flaw to crash the QEMU process on the host, resulting in a denial of service condition, or potentially execute arbitrary code within the context of the QEMU process on the host. This flaw affects QEMU versions before 7.0.0.
Referencing memory after it has been freed can cause a program to crash, use unexpected values, or execute code.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qemu | Qemu | * | 7.0.0 (excluding) |
The use of previously-freed memory can have any number of adverse consequences, ranging from the corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code, depending on the instantiation and timing of the flaw. The simplest way data corruption may occur involves the system’s reuse of the freed memory. Use-after-free errors have two common and sometimes overlapping causes:
In this scenario, the memory in question is allocated to another pointer validly at some point after it has been freed. The original pointer to the freed memory is used again and points to somewhere within the new allocation. As the data is changed, it corrupts the validly used memory; this induces undefined behavior in the process. If the newly allocated data happens to hold a class, in C++ for example, various function pointers may be scattered within the heap data. If one of these function pointers is overwritten with an address to valid shellcode, execution of arbitrary code can be achieved.