CVE-2021-28038 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2021-28038?

CVE-2021-28038 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 5 Mar 2021. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 5.11.3, as used with Xen PV. A certain part of the netback driver lacks necessary treatment of errors such as failed memory allocations (as a result of changes to the handling of grant mapping errors). A host OS denial of service may occur during misbehavior of a networking frontend driver. NOTE: this issue exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2021-26931.

Weakness: CWE-770

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-28038?

It affects 4 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Linux kernel, Netapp Cloud Backup, Netapp Solidfire Baseboard Management Controller Firmware.

How do I fix CVE-2021-28038?

Apply the vendor's patch.

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-2021-28038 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-28038 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

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• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2021-28038, GHSA-j7vw-r676-53wr, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-28038.