CVE detail

CVE-2020-8834 — CVE-2020-8834

Published 2020-04-09 · Modified 2026-06-17 · Vendor linux · Product linux_kernel · Source nvd
MEDIUM
severity
CVSS-derived band
6.5
CVSS v3
0–10 scale
0.0035
EPSS probability
exploitation probability, 30d
27.0%
EPSS percentile
percentile vs all CVEs
NOT LISTED
CISA KEV
known exploited catalog

Description

KVM in the Linux kernel on Power8 processors has a conflicting use of HSTATE_HOST_R1 to store r1 state in kvmppc_hv_entry plus in kvmppc_{save,restore}_tm, leading to a stack corruption. Because of this, an attacker with the ability run code in kernel space of a guest VM can cause the host kernel to panic. There were two commits that, according to the reporter, introduced the vulnerability: f024ee098476 ("KVM: PPC: Book3S HV: Pull out TM state save/restore into separate procedures") 87a11bb6a7f7 ("KVM: PPC: Book3S HV: Work around XER[SO] bug in fake suspend mode") The former landed in 4.8, the latter in 4.17. This was fixed without realizing the impact in 4.18 with the following three commits, though it's believed the first is the only strictly necessary commit: 6f597c6b63b6 ("KVM: PPC: Bo

Remediation

No vendor-published fix data in our corpus for this CVE. Check the references below or the vendor's PSIRT / security advisories page.

References

cvedb.io · NVD · CISA KEV · FIRST EPSS · vendor advisories (CVE Program List v5). Informational only, no warranty — verify every remediation against the vendor advisory before acting on it. This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD, CISA, FIRST.org or any vendor named. CVE® is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.