CVE-2022-2196: Debian Linux

High severity, CVSS 8.8. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A regression exists in the Linux Kernel within KVM: nVMX that allowed for speculative execution attacks. L2 can carry out Spectre v2 attacks on L1 due to L1 thinking it doesn't need retpolines or IBPB after running L2 due to KVM (L0) advertising eIBRS support to L1. An attacker at L2 with code execution can execute code on an indirect branch on the host machine. We recommend upgrading to Kernel 6.2 or applying the relevant stable backports (v5.4.233, v5.10.170, v5.15.96, v6.1.14).

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 10.0 only
• Linux Linux Kernel: from 5.4.47, before 5.4.233 (fixed in 5.4.233); from 5.6.19, before 5.7 (fixed in 5.7); from 5.7.3, before 5.10.170 (fixed in 5.10.170); from 5.11, before 5.15.96 (fixed in 5.15.96); from 5.16, before 6.1.14 (fixed in 6.1.14)

Published 2023-01-09. Last modified 2026-08-07.