CVE-2021-20221: Debian Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 6.0. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

An out-of-bounds heap buffer access issue was found in the ARM Generic Interrupt Controller emulator of QEMU up to and including qemu 4.2.0on aarch64 platform. The issue occurs because while writing an interrupt ID to the controller memory area, it is not masked to be 4 bits wide. It may lead to the said issue while updating controller state fields and their subsequent processing. A privileged guest user may use this flaw to crash the QEMU process on the host resulting in DoS scenario.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 9.0 only; version 10.0 only
• Qemu Qemu: up to and including 4.2.0
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 8.0 only

Published 2021-05-13. Last modified 2026-06-17.