CVE-2016-6490

Publication date 10 December 2016

Last updated 25 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

The virtqueue_map_desc function in hw/virtio/virtio.c in QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) allows local guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (infinite loop and QEMU process crash) via a zero length for the descriptor buffer.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
qemu	16.04 LTS xenial	Not affected
	15.10 wily	Ignored end of life
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not affected
	12.04 LTS precise	Not in release
qemu-kvm	16.04 LTS xenial	Not in release
	15.10 wily	Not in release
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not in release
	12.04 LTS precise	Not affected

Notes

mdeslaur

introduced in 2.6.0

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
qemu	Upstream: http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commit;h=1e7aed70144b4673fc26e73062064b6724795e5f

Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v3.0

Base score 4.4 · Medium

Base metrics

Parameter	Value
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	High
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality impact	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High

Scores

Parameter	Value
Base score	4.4 · Medium
Exploitability score	-
Impact score	-

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H