Arm provides multiple helpers to clean & invalidate the cache
for a given region. This is, for instance, used when allocating
guest memory to ensure any writes (such as the ones during scrubbing)
have reached memory before handing over the page to a guest.
Unfortunately, the arithmetics in the helpers can overflow and would
then result to skip the cache cleaning/invalidation. Therefore there
is no guarantee when all the writes will reach the memory.
For migration as well as to work around kernels unaware of L1TF (see
XSA-273), PV guests may be run in shadow paging mode. Since Xen itself
needs to be mapped when PV guests run, Xen and shadowed PV guests run
directly the respective shadow page tables. For 64-bit PV guests this
means running on the shadow of the guest root page table.
In the course of dealing with shortage of memory in the shadow pool
associated with a domain, shadows of page tables may be torn down. This
tearing down may include the shadow root page table that the CPU in
question is presently running on. While a precaution exists to
supposedly prevent the tearing down of the underlying live page table,
the time window covered by that precaution isn't large enough.
When a transaction is committed, C Xenstored will first check
the quota is correct before attempting to commit any nodes. It would
be possible that accounting is temporarily negative if a node has
been removed outside of the transaction.
Unfortunately, some versions of C Xenstored are assuming that the
quota cannot be negative and are using assert() to confirm it. This
will lead to C Xenstored crash when tools are built without -DNDEBUG
(this is the default).
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).
[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the
text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.]
libfsimage contains parsing code for several filesystems, most of them based on
grub-legacy code. libfsimage is used by pygrub to inspect guest disks.
Pygrub runs as the same user as the toolstack (root in a priviledged domain).
At least one issue has been reported to the Xen Security Team that allows an
attacker to trigger a stack buffer overflow in libfsimage. After further
analisys the Xen Security Team is no longer confident in the suitability of
libfsimage when run against guest controlled input with super user priviledges.
In order to not affect current deployments that rely on pygrub patches are
provided in the resolution section of the advisory that allow running pygrub in
deprivileged mode.
CVE-2023-4949 refers to the original issue in the upstream grub
project ("An attacker with local access to a system (either through a
disk or external drive) can present a modified XFS partition to
grub-legacy in such a way to exploit a memory corruption in grub’s XFS
file system implementation.") CVE-2023-34325 refers specifically to
the vulnerabilities in Xen's copy of libfsimage, which is decended
from a very old version of grub.
The caching invalidation guidelines from the AMD-Vi specification (48882—Rev
3.07-PUB—Oct 2022) is incorrect on some hardware, as devices will malfunction
(see stale DMA mappings) if some fields of the DTE are updated but the IOMMU
TLB is not flushed.
Such stale DMA mappings can point to memory ranges not owned by the guest, thus
allowing access to unindented memory regions.
[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the
text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.]
AMD CPUs since ~2014 have extensions to normal x86 debugging functionality.
Xen supports guests using these extensions.
Unfortunately there are errors in Xen's handling of the guest state, leading
to denials of service.
1) CVE-2023-34327 - An HVM vCPU can end up operating in the context of
a previous vCPUs debug mask state.
2) CVE-2023-34328 - A PV vCPU can place a breakpoint over the live GDT.
This allows the PV vCPU to exploit XSA-156 / CVE-2015-8104 and lock
up the CPU entirely.
[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the
text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.]
AMD CPUs since ~2014 have extensions to normal x86 debugging functionality.
Xen supports guests using these extensions.
Unfortunately there are errors in Xen's handling of the guest state, leading
to denials of service.
1) CVE-2023-34327 - An HVM vCPU can end up operating in the context of
a previous vCPUs debug mask state.
2) CVE-2023-34328 - A PV vCPU can place a breakpoint over the live GDT.
This allows the PV vCPU to exploit XSA-156 / CVE-2015-8104 and lock
up the CPU entirely.
Cortex-A77 cores (r0p0 and r1p0) are affected by erratum 1508412
where software, under certain circumstances, could deadlock a core
due to the execution of either a load to device or non-cacheable memory,
and either a store exclusive or register read of the Physical
Address Register (PAR_EL1) in close proximity.
An attacker with local access to a system (either through a disk or external drive) can present a modified XFS partition to grub-legacy in such a way to exploit a memory corruption in grub’s XFS file system implementation.