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).
[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.
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.
The fix for XSA-423 added logic to Linux'es netback driver to deal with
a frontend splitting a packet in a way such that not all of the headers
would come in one piece. Unfortunately the logic introduced there
didn't account for the extreme case of the entire packet being split
into as many pieces as permitted by the protocol, yet still being
smaller than the area that's specially dealt with to keep all (possible)
headers together. Such an unusual packet would therefore trigger a
buffer overrun in the driver.
x86 shadow plus log-dirty mode use-after-free In environments where host assisted address translation is necessary but Hardware Assisted Paging (HAP) is unavailable, Xen will run guests in so called shadow mode. Shadow mode maintains a pool of memory used for both shadow page tables as well as auxiliary data structures. To migrate or snapshot guests, Xen additionally runs them in so called log-dirty mode. The data structures needed by the log-dirty tracking are part of aformentioned auxiliary data. In order to keep error handling efforts within reasonable bounds, for operations which may require memory allocations shadow mode logic ensures up front that enough memory is available for the worst case requirements. Unfortunately, while page table memory is properly accounted for on the code path requiring the potential establishing of new shadows, demands by the log-dirty infrastructure were not taken into consideration. As a result, just established shadow page tables could be freed again immediately, while other code is still accessing them on the assumption that they would remain allocated.
Oxenstored 32->31 bit integer truncation issues Integers in Ocaml are 63 or 31 bits of signed precision. The Ocaml Xenbus library takes a C uint32_t out of the ring and casts it directly to an Ocaml integer. In 64-bit Ocaml builds this is fine, but in 32-bit builds, it truncates off the most significant bit, and then creates unsigned/signed confusion in the remainder. This in turn can feed a negative value into logic not expecting a negative value, resulting in unexpected exceptions being thrown. The unexpected exception is not handled suitably, creating a busy-loop trying (and failing) to take the bad packet out of the xenstore ring.
Arm: unbounded memory consumption for 2nd-level page tables Certain actions require e.g. removing pages from a guest's P2M (Physical-to-Machine) mapping. When large pages are in use to map guest pages in the 2nd-stage page tables, such a removal operation may incur a memory allocation (to replace a large mapping with individual smaller ones). These memory allocations are taken from the global memory pool. A malicious guest might be able to cause the global memory pool to be exhausted by manipulating its own P2M mappings.
lock order inversion in transitive grant copy handling As part of XSA-226 a missing cleanup call was inserted on an error handling path. While doing so, locking requirements were not paid attention to. As a result two cooperating guests granting each other transitive grants can cause locks to be acquired nested within one another, but in respectively opposite order. With suitable timing between the involved grant copy operations this may result in the locking up of a CPU.