VulnerabilityPublished 23 Mar 2023Updated 3 Nov 2025

CVE-2023-1544: fedora · Out-of-bounds Read

Source CVE Database V5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 6.0 Medium.

Data as of 26 Oct 2026, 14:05 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score

6.0Medium

How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 23% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

Attack Vector: Local
Attack Complexity: Low
Privileges Required: High
User Interaction: None
Scope: Changed
Confidentiality: None
Integrity: None
Availability: High

Bold values are the worst case: easiest to exploit or largest impact.

Attack Vector: Local: The vulnerable component is not bound to the network stack and the attacker’s path is via read/write/execute capabilities. Either: the attacker exploits the vulnerability by accessing the target system locally (e.g., keyboard, console), or remotely (e.g., SSH); or the attacker relies on User Interaction by another person to perform actions required to exploit the vulnerability (e.g., tricking a legitimate user into opening a malicious document).
Attack Complexity: Low: Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable component.
Privileges Required: High: The attacker is authorized with (i.e., requires) privileges that provide significant (e.g., administrative) control over the vulnerable component that could affect component-wide settings and files.
User Interaction: None: The vulnerable system can be exploited without any interaction from any user.
Scope: Changed: An exploited vulnerability can affect resources beyond the security scope managed by the security authority of the vulnerable component. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are different and managed by different security authorities.
Confidentiality: None: There is no loss of confidentiality within the impacted component.
Integrity: None: There is no loss of integrity within the impacted component.
Availability: High: There is total loss of availability, resulting in the attacker being able to fully deny access to resources in the impacted component; this loss is either sustained (while the attacker continues to deliver the attack) or persistent (the condition persists even after the attack has completed). Alternatively, the attacker has the ability to deny some availability, but the loss of availability presents a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component (e.g., the attacker cannot disrupt existing connections, but can prevent new connections; the attacker can repeatedly exploit a vulnerability that, in each instance of a successful attack, leaks a only small amount of memory, but after repeated exploitation causes a service to become completely unavailable).

Definitions: FIRST CVSS v3.1 specification.

Exploitation evidence

Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 23 Mar 2023
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponised: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 26 Oct 2026.

Disclosed: The CVE record is public on cve.org. Its publication is t = 0.
Detectable: A public nuclei template can find exposed instances, for defenders and attackers alike.
Weaponised: Public exploit code exists in Metasploit or Exploit-DB, or CISA SSVC or the CVSS exploit maturity reports a public proof of concept.
Exploited in the wild: CISA KEV lists it, CISA SSVC rates exploitation active, or a source reports attacks.
Observed by OffSeq Mirage: OffSeq Mirage honeypot sensors recorded attack traffic for this CVE, or found exposed hosts without attack traffic.

Moments are spaced evenly, not to scale; a dashed line marks a gap of six months or more. Deltas count from t = 0. Sources that give only a date (CISA KEV, Exploit-DB, or a time of exactly 00:00Z) read “same day” rather than hours. Metasploit modules carry the flaw’s disclosure date, not their release date, and nuclei templates carry no date, so both appear above but not on the timeline.

What to do

AI-suggested

Monitor vendor advisories and apply patches or updates to QEMU as soon as they become available to address CVE-2023-1544.
Restrict guest VM privileges to the minimum necessary, avoiding granting high-level privileges that could be exploited to trigger this vulnerability.
Disable or avoid using VMware paravirtual RDMA devices in QEMU guests unless explicitly required, as this reduces the attack surface.
Implement strict access controls and monitoring on guest VMs to detect abnormal behavior indicative of attempts to exploit this vulnerability.
Use resource limits and quotas on guest VMs to prevent excessive allocation of page tables or other resources that could lead to out-of-bounds conditions.
In multi-tenant environments, isolate critical workloads on separate hosts or hypervisors to limit the blast radius of potential hypervisor crashes.
Regularly audit and update virtualization infrastructure configurations to align with security best practices and reduce exposure to known vulnerabilities.

Description

A flaw was found in the QEMU implementation of VMWare's paravirtual RDMA device. This flaw allows a crafted guest driver to allocate and initialize a huge number of page tables to be used as a ring of descriptors for CQ and async events, potentially leading to an out-of-bounds read and crash of QEMU.

Impact

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2023-1544 is on availability. Exploitation could lead to denial of service by crashing the QEMU hypervisor, which would disrupt all virtual machines running on the affected host. This could cause significant operational downtime, especially in environments relying heavily on virtualization for critical workloads, such as cloud service providers, financial institutions, and large enterprises. Since the vulnerability requires high privileges within the guest VM, the risk is elevated in multi-tenant environments where untrusted or less trusted users have guest access. Confidentiality and integrity of data are not directly affected, but service disruption could indirectly impact business continuity and compliance with service-level agreements. The lack of known exploits reduces immediate risk, but the medium severity score and potential for denial of service warrant proactive mitigation. Organizations using QEMU with VMware paravirtual RDMA devices should assess their exposure and prepare for patch deployment.

References

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