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CVE-2021-38198

Description

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel, where it incorrectly computes the access permissions of a shadow page. This issue leads to a missing guest protection page fault.

Statement

The issue is rated as having Low impact because the issue is not present when hardware-assisted paging (also known as nested paging and Second Level Address Translation) is enabled. Hardware-assisted paging is enabled by default for CPUs that support it. Any realistic real-life virtualization scenario benefits greatly from hardware assisted paging speed up, so deployments without hardware-assisted paging are very rare.

Mitigation

Do not disable hardware-assisted paging (also known as nested paging and Second Level Address Translation) on your hosts. The default is on.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score6.45.5N/A
Attack VectorLocalLocalN/A
Attack ComplexityHighLowN/A
Privileges RequiredHighLowN/A
User InteractionNoneNoneN/A
ScopeUnchangedUnchangedN/A
ConfidentialityHighNoneN/A
Integrity ImpactHighNoneN/A
Availability ImpactHighHighN/A

Vector

Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Frequently Asked Questions

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