CVE-2013-6437 OpenStack Nova DoS through ephemeral disk backing files

What is CVE-2013-6437?

CVE-2013-6437 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in n/a, published on 6 Mar 2014. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The libvirt driver in OpenStack Compute (Nova) before 2013.2.2 and icehouse before icehouse-2 allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (disk consumption) by creating and deleting instances with unique os_type settings, which triggers the creation of a new ephemeral disk backing file.

Weakness: CWE-399

Which versions are affected by CVE-2013-6437?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including nova. It affects 1 product.

Products include Openstack Nova.

How do I fix CVE-2013-6437?

Upgrade nova to 12.0.0a0 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2013-6437 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2013-6437 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in n/a

• CVE-2017-7214 OpenStack Nova logs sensitive context from notification exceptions Critical 9.8
• CVE-2017-17051 OpenStack Nova DoS by rebuilding the same instance with a new image multiple times High 8.6
• CVE-2020-17376 OpenStack Nova Live migration fails to update persistent domain XML High 8.3
• CVE-2017-18191 OpenStack Nova Denial of service attack on the compute host High 7.5
• CVE-2015-3280 OpenStack Compute (nova) allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service Medium 6.8

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2013-6437, GHSA-hrv9-4x4c-9jc8, PYSEC-2026-874.