VulnerabilityPublished 24 Jul 2023Updated 6 Nov 2025

CVE-2023-3019: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 · Use After Free

Affects Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Source 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 24% 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 24 Jul 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

To mitigate CVE-2023-3019, European organizations should: 1) Monitor Red Hat advisories and apply official patches or updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and QEMU as soon as they become available. 2) Restrict privileged access within guest virtual machines to trusted administrators only, minimizing the risk of insider threats or compromised guest accounts. 3) Implement strict access controls and monitoring on virtualization hosts to detect unusual QEMU process crashes or guest VM behavior indicative of exploitation attempts. 4) Consider disabling or replacing the e1000e NIC emulation with alternative virtual NIC models if feasible and compatible with workloads. 5) Employ network segmentation and isolation for critical virtual machines to limit the blast radius of potential DoS attacks. 6) Regularly audit and update virtualization infrastructure configurations to follow security best practices recommended by Red Hat and QEMU communities. 7) Prepare incident response plans that include recovery procedures for QEMU process crashes to minimize downtime. These steps go beyond generic advice by focusing on access control, monitoring, and configuration adjustments specific to the vulnerability context.

Description

A DMA reentrancy issue leading to a use-after-free error was found in the e1000e NIC emulation code in QEMU. This issue could allow a privileged guest user to crash the QEMU process on the host, resulting in a denial of service.

Impact

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2023-3019 is the potential for denial of service in virtualized environments running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with QEMU. This can disrupt critical services hosted on affected virtual machines, leading to operational downtime and potential business continuity issues. Since the vulnerability requires privileged guest access, the risk is higher in multi-tenant or cloud environments where multiple users share virtualized infrastructure. The lack of confidentiality or integrity impact reduces the risk of data breaches but does not eliminate the operational risks associated with service outages. Organizations relying heavily on RHEL 8 for virtualization, especially in sectors like finance, telecommunications, and government, may face increased exposure. Additionally, the vulnerability could be leveraged as part of a broader attack chain if an attacker gains privileged access within a guest VM. The absence of known exploits reduces immediate risk but does not preclude future exploitation attempts. Overall, the impact is medium but significant enough to warrant timely remediation to maintain service availability and trust in virtualized infrastructure.

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Exploitation evidence

What to do

Description

AI analysisMachine-generated, updated 10 Nov 2025, 21:06 UTC

Technical details

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