An uninitialized pointer in the cleanup of the vhost‑crypto write‑back chain can cause the host process to enter an infinite loop or crash when a guest descriptor mapping fails. The flaw allows a guest to deliberately trigger the issue, resulting in a denial of service as the host’s vhost‑crypto process becomes unresponsive. This weakness is reflected in CWE‑824, which describes uncontrolled recursion or similar control‑flow problems.

Affected users are those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9, 10, Fast Datapath for those OSes, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13. The vulnerability exists wherever the DPDK vhost‑crypto component is in use; specific version information is not supplied in the advisory.

The CVSS score of 6.5 indicates a medium severity. EPSS is not reported and the flaw is not listed in CISA’s KEV catalogue. The attack requires a guest that is able to interact with the host’s virtio‑crypto vhost‑user backend and to send a descriptor that fails to map. An adversary could exploit this on a shared virtualization host or in a multi‑tenant OpenShift cluster by leveraging the vhost‑crypto service from an untrusted guest to cause a denial of service on the platform.