XEN : Security Vulnerabilities, CVEs, CVSS score between 4 and 4.99

The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled. However, the original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown (XPTI) deliberately left interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active. As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.

Closing of an event channel in the Linux kernel can result in a deadlock. This happens when the close is being performed in parallel to an unrelated Xen console action and the handling of a Xen console interrupt in an unprivileged guest. The closing of an event channel is e.g. triggered by removal of a paravirtual device on the other side. As this action will cause console messages to be issued on the other side quite often, the chance of triggering the deadlock is not neglectable. Note that 32-bit Arm-guests are not affected, as the 32-bit Linux kernel on Arm doesn't use queued-RW-locks, which are required to trigger the issue (on Arm32 a waiting writer doesn't block further readers to get the lock).

Insufficient cleanup of passed-through device IRQs The management of IRQs associated with physical devices exposed to x86 HVM guests involves an iterative operation in particular when cleaning up after the guest's use of the device. In the case where an interrupt is not quiescent yet at the time this cleanup gets invoked, the cleanup attempt may be scheduled to be retried. When multiple interrupts are involved, this scheduling of a retry may get erroneously skipped. At the same time pointers may get cleared (resulting in a de-reference of NULL) and freed (resulting in a use-after-free), while other code would continue to assume them to be valid.

Xen through 4.14.x allows guest OS administrators to obtain sensitive information (such as AES keys from outside the guest) via a side-channel attack on a power/energy monitoring interface, aka a "Platypus" attack. NOTE: there is only one logically independent fix: to change the access control for each such interface in Xen.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There is a race condition when migrating timers between x86 HVM vCPUs. When migrating timers of x86 HVM guests between its vCPUs, the locking model used allows for a second vCPU of the same guest (also operating on the timers) to release a lock that it didn't acquire. The most likely effect of the issue is a hang or crash of the hypervisor, i.e., a Denial of Service (DoS). All versions of Xen are affected. Only x86 systems are vulnerable. Arm systems are not vulnerable. Only x86 HVM guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 PV and PVH cannot leverage the vulnerability. Only guests with more than one vCPU can exploit the vulnerability.

Buffer overflow in Xen 4.7.x and earlier allows local x86 HVM guest OS administrators on guests running with shadow paging to cause a denial of service via a pagetable update.

The libxl device-handling in Xen through 4.6.x allows local guest OS users with access to the driver domain to cause a denial of service (management tool confusion) by manipulating information in the backend directories in xenstore.

The PCI backend driver in Xen, when running on an x86 system and using Linux 3.1.x through 4.3.x as the driver domain, allows local guest administrators to generate a continuous stream of WARN messages and cause a denial of service (disk consumption) by leveraging a system with access to a passed-through MSI or MSI-X capable physical PCI device and XEN_PCI_OP_enable_msi operations, aka "Linux pciback missing sanity checks."

The memory_exchange function in common/memory.c in Xen 3.2.x through 4.6.x does not properly release locks, which might allow guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (deadlock or host crash) via unspecified vectors, related to XENMEM_exchange error handling.

The memory_exchange function in common/memory.c in Xen 3.2.x through 4.6.x does not properly hand back pages to a domain, which might allow guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (host crash) via unspecified vectors related to domain teardown.

The KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel through 4.2.6, and Xen 4.3.x through 4.6.x, allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS panic or hang) by triggering many #DB (aka Debug) exceptions, related to svm.c.

The p2m_pod_emergency_sweep function in arch/x86/mm/p2m-pod.c in Xen 3.4.x, 3.5.x, and 3.6.x is not preemptible, which allows local x86 HVM guest administrators to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption and possibly reboot) via crafted memory contents that triggers a "time-consuming linear scan," related to Populate-on-Demand.

Multiple memory leaks in Xen 4.0 through 4.6.x allow local guest administrators or domains with certain permission to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via a large number of "teardowns" of domains with the vcpu pointer array allocated using the (1) XEN_DOMCTL_max_vcpus hypercall or the xenoprofile state vcpu pointer array allocated using the (2) XENOPROF_get_buffer or (3) XENOPROF_set_passive hypercall.

Race condition in the relinquish_memory function in arch/arm/domain.c in Xen 4.6.x and earlier allows local domains with partial management control to cause a denial of service (host crash) via vectors involving the destruction of a domain and using XENMEM_decrease_reservation to reduce the memory of the domain.

The hypercall_create_continuation function in arch/arm/domain.c in Xen 4.4.x through 4.6.x allows local guest users to cause a denial of service (host crash) via a preemptible hypercall to the multicall interface.

The KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel through 4.2.6, and Xen 4.3.x through 4.6.x, allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS panic or hang) by triggering many #AC (aka Alignment Check) exceptions, related to svm.c and vmx.c.

The compat_iret function in Xen 3.1 through 4.5 iterates the wrong way through a loop, which allows local 32-bit PV guest administrators to cause a denial of service (large loop and system hang) via a hypercall_iret call with EFLAGS.VM set.

GNTTABOP_swap_grant_ref in Xen 4.2 through 4.5 does not check the grant table operation version, which allows local guest domains to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference) via a hypercall without a GNTTABOP_setup_table or GNTTABOP_set_version.

Xen 3.3.x through 4.5.x enables logging for PCI MSI-X pass-through error messages, which allows local x86 HVM guests to cause a denial of service (host disk consumption) via certain invalid operations.

Xen 3.3.x through 4.5.x does not properly restrict write access to the host MSI message data field, which allows local x86 HVM guest administrators to cause a denial of service (host interrupt handling confusion) via vectors related to qemu and accessing spanning multiple fields.

QEMU, as used in Xen 3.3.x through 4.5.x, does not properly restrict access to PCI command registers, which might allow local HVM guest users to cause a denial of service (non-maskable interrupt and host crash) by disabling the (1) memory or (2) I/O decoding for a PCI Express device and then accessing the device, which triggers an Unsupported Request (UR) response.

The XEN_DOMCTL_memory_mapping hypercall in Xen 3.2.x through 4.5.x, when using a PCI passthrough device, is not preemptible, which allows local x86 HVM domain users to cause a denial of service (host CPU consumption) via a crafted request to the device model (qemu-dm).

Xen 3.3.x through 4.5.x and the Linux kernel through 3.19.1 do not properly restrict access to PCI command registers, which might allow local guest OS users to cause a denial of service (non-maskable interrupt and host crash) by disabling the (1) memory or (2) I/O decoding for a PCI Express device and then accessing the device, which triggers an Unsupported Request (UR) response.

The vgic_v2_to_sgi function in arch/arm/vgic-v2.c in Xen 4.5.x, when running on ARM hardware with general interrupt controller (GIC) version 2, allows local guest users to cause a denial of service (host crash) by writing an invalid value to the GICD.SGIR register.

Xen 4.4.x and earlier, when using a large number of VCPUs, does not properly handle read and write locks, which allows local x86 guest users to cause a denial of service (write denial or NMI watchdog timeout and host crash) via a large number of read requests, a different vulnerability than CVE-2014-9065.