Medium
Security advisory
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.
- Products
- Not specified
- Affected versions
- Not specified
- Fixed versions
- Not specified
- CVEs
- CVE-2021-20221
- Confirmed fixed CVEs
- Not specified
- Updated in this feed
- 1 Nov 2026, 06:10 UTC · Revision 1
Source evidence
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.
osv:CVE-2021-20221
Complete source record
{
"id": "e4fbfcd93c676c0e766d7b64f1bb1df7f41f7468bb76a60dac157186cbc26efb",
"url": "https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2021-20221",
"method": "structured",
"payload": {
"kind": "advisory",
"title": "CVE-2021-20221",
"summary": "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.",
"evidence": "osv:CVE-2021-20221",
"products": [],
"severity": "medium",
"structured": {
"id": "CVE-2021-20221",
"aliases": [
"CVE-2021-20221"
],
"metrics": [
{
"type": "CVSS_V3",
"score": "CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H"
}
],
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],
"modified": "2026-10-24T10:30:36.273367545Z",
"provider": "osv",
"references": [
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/02/msg00024.html",
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/09/msg00008.html",
"https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20210708-0005/",
"https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1924601"
],
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{
"value": "CVE-2021-20221",
"evidence": "/id"
}
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"security_relevant": true,
"severity_evidence": "/severity/0/score"
},
"source_id": "core-osv",
"document_id": 433925,
"published_at": "2021-05-13T16:15:07.697+00:00"
}