CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-12168 — Linux Linux Kernel security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6

The access_pmu_evcntr function in arch/arm64/kvm/sys_regs.c in the Linux kernel before 4.8.11 allows privileged KVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service (assertion failure and host OS crash) by accessing the Performance Monitors Cycle Count Register (PMCCNTR).

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6 (3.1)
Published
2017-09-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-617

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.