A use-after-free vulnerability was found in the way the Linux kernel’s KVM hypervisor emulates a preemption timer for L2 guests when nested (=1) virtualization is enabled. This high resolution timer(hrtimer) runs when a L2 guest is active. After VM exit, the sync_vmcs12() timer object is stopped. The use-after-free occurs if the timer object is freed before calling sync_vmcs12() routine. A guest user/process could use this flaw to crash the host kernel resulting in a denial of service or, potentially, gain privileged access to a system.