CVE-2016-1981: n/a vulnerability

CVE-2016-1981: QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) built with the e1000 NIC emulation support is vulnerable to an infinite loop issue.

QEMU (aka Quick Emulator) built with the e1000 NIC emulation support is vulnerable to an infinite loop issue. It could occur while processing data via transmit or receive descriptors, provided the initial receive/transmit descriptor head (TDH/RDH) is set outside the allocated descriptor buffer. A privileged user inside guest could use this flaw to crash the QEMU instance resulting in DoS.

UnknownCVSS not scoredNot KEV-listedUpdatedAug 5, 2024, 23:17 UTC (UTC+00:00)

Security readout for executives and security teams

CVE-2016-1981 is a denial-of-service flaw in QEMU when e1000 network card emulation is enabled. A privileged user inside a guest VM could crash or hang that VM's QEMU process. Business impact is mainly availability of affected virtual machines, especially where tenants or workloads are not fully trusted. Exposure is most likely on virtualization hosts running QEMU with e1000 NIC emulation for guest VMs. Risk is higher in multi-tenant or delegated-administration environments where guest privileged users are not fully trusted. The bundle does not provide exact affected version ranges. Treat as a targeted availability risk for QEMU virtualization. Patch in normal security maintenance, with faster handling for shared hosting, tenant-controlled guests, or critical VMs using e1000 emulation. Mitigation focus: Review QEMU vendor advisories for the affected distributions in use.; Apply QEMU security updates from Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat, or relevant vendor channels.; Inventory guests configured with e1000 NIC emulation..

Prepared: Jun 13, 2026, 12:51 UTC (UTC+00:00)

Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.

Potential ATT&CK relevance

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Vulnerability profileCVE Program record

Severity: Unknown
CVSS: Not scored
Known Exploited: No
Published: Dec 29, 2016, 22:00 UTC (UTC+00:00)

Official CVE source material

CNA and ADP enrichment extracted from CVE v5

These fields come from the CVE record and ADP containers, not from Glexia's Take. They preserve time-varying source decisions such as CISA SSVC, KEV status, CVSS metrics, and provider references.

0CVSS vectors

0Timeline events

0ADP providers

4Source links

CVSS and timeline data

No CVSS vectors or timeline events were available in the normalized CVE source material.

Source materials

CVE List V5 sourceCVE List V5
[qemu-devel] 20160119 [PATCH] e1000: eliminate infinite loops on out-of-bounds transfer startCVE reference · mailing-list, x_refsource_MLIST
GLSA-201604-01CVE reference · vendor-advisory, x_refsource_GENTOO
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1298570CVE reference · x_refsource_CONFIRM

Affected products

Products and packages named in the record

VendorProductVersion / packageStatus

n/an/an/aListed

Weakness

CWE details

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