CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2016-1981 — QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) built with the e1000 NIC emulation support is vulnerable to an infinite loop issue

Medium CVSS 5.5

QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) built with the e1000 NIC emulation support is vulnerable to an infinite loop issue. It could occur while processing data via transmit or receive descriptors, provided the initial receive/transmit descriptor head (TDH/RDH) is set outside the allocated descriptor buffer. A privileged user inside guest could use this flaw to crash the QEMU instance resulting in DoS.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2016-12-29
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • qemu / qemu
  • debian / debian_linux / 7.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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