Quick answers
- Is CVE-2013-4469 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2013-4469 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2013-4469?
- Informational severity, with a CVSS score of 0, published 6 July 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- nova (PyPI) ECOSYSTEM:introduced=0,fixed=12.0.0a0.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2013-4469?
- Yes. nova (PyPI): upgrade to 12.0.0a0 or later. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2013-4469 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in a hosted service.
- Am I affected by CVE-2013-4469?
- Check whether you run nova (PyPI) at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
How to fix
- nova (PyPI): upgrade to 12.0.0a0 or later
pip install "nova>=12.0.0a0"
Technical details
The vulnerability is an input validation flaw in Nova's QCOW2 image handling. When use_cow_images is disabled, Nova does not verify the virtual size attribute of QCOW2 images downloaded from Glance before allocating disk space, even though the actual image data is much smaller. An attacker with local access can craft a QCOW2 image with a large virtual size declaration that consumes significant host filesystem space during allocation, causing denial of service. The fix involves adding size verification in the image backend's fetch and create_image functions to validate virtual size against a maximum allowed size before proceeding with image download and conversion.
Affected products
- OpenStack Nova Folsom, Grizzly, Havana (before 12.0.0a0)
Identifiers
- CVE-2013-4469
- GHSA-2w87-5qcj-j6gx
- PYSEC-2026-860
Timeline
- 2013-11-02: disclosed
- 2013-10-31: patched: Fix committed via multiple patches including 135faa7, 3cdfe89, f6810be
- 2022-05-17: advisory: GHSA-2w87-5qcj-j6gx published