Palo Alto Networks Discovers New QEMU Vulnerability
Summary: Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 discovered CVE-2017-12809, a flaw in QEMU from version 2.8 in which the emulated hard drive controller mishandles the ATA_CACHE_FLUSH command, causing a NULL pointer dereference and termination of the QEMU host process when the command is issued to a removable drive with no disk present. It was fixed in QEMU 2.10.0, released August 30, 2017, and on Windows an unprivileged process can trigger it from user mode by opening a handle to the emulated CDROM drive with CreateFile() and calling DeviceIoControl() with IOCTL_ATA_PASS_THROUGH.
What you should know: Many security products use QEMU to sandbox files while deciding whether they are malicious, and an attacker who triggers this crash before the malicious behavior can force those products to classify malicious files as benign.
Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗
- Topics
- Vulnerabilities & Patching
- Mentions
- CVE-2017-12809
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