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Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

CVE-2016-9914

Medium
4.9/10

Summary

Memory leak in hw/9pfs/9p.c in QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) allows local privileged guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host memory consumption and possibly QEMU process crash) by leveraging a missing cleanup operation in FileOperations.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • COMPLETE

CWE-401 - Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)

'Missing release of memory after effective lifetime (memory leak)' is a weakness that occurs when software doesn't effectively release allocated memory after it is used. If not addressed, this enables attackers to launch denial of service attacks (by crashing or hanging the program) or take advantage of other unexpected behavior resulting from low memory conditions.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published