CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-5088 — Qemu Qemu security vulnerability

High CVSS 7

A bug in QEMU could cause a guest I/O operation otherwise addressed to an arbitrary disk offset to be targeted to offset 0 instead (potentially overwriting the VM's boot code). This could be used, for example, by L2 guests with a virtual disk (vdiskL2) stored on a virtual disk of an L1 (vdiskL1) hypervisor to read and/or write data to LBA 0 of vdiskL1, potentially gaining control of L1 at its next reboot.

Severity
High
CVSS
7 (3.1)
Published
2023-11-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-821, CWE-662

Affected products

  • qemu / qemu
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 9.0

Showing 3 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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