CVE-2014-8481: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 4.9. EPSS: 0.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The instruction decoder in arch/x86/kvm/emulate.c in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel before 3.18-rc2 does not properly handle invalid instructions, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and host OS crash) via a crafted application that triggers (1) an improperly fetched instruction or (2) an instruction that occupies too many bytes. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2014-8480.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: up to and including 3.18

Published 2014-11-10. Last modified 2026-06-17.