CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-21161 — Vulnerability in the Oracle VM VirtualBox product of Oracle Virtualization (component: Core)

Medium CVSS 5.5

Vulnerability in the Oracle VM VirtualBox product of Oracle Virtualization (component: Core). Supported versions that are affected are Prior to 7.0.20. Easily exploitable vulnerability allows low privileged attacker with logon to the infrastructure where Oracle VM VirtualBox executes to compromise Oracle VM VirtualBox. Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized ability to cause a hang or frequently repeatable crash (complete DOS) of Oracle VM VirtualBox. Note: This vulnerability applies to Linux hosts only. CVSS 3.1 Base Score 5.5 (Availability impacts). CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-07-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • oracle / vm_virtualbox

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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