An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. When a Xenstore watch fires, the xenstore client that registered the watch will receive a Xenstore message containing the path of the modified Xenstore entry that triggered the watch, and the tag that was specified when registering the watch. Any communication with xenstored is done via Xenstore messages, consisting of a message header and the payload. The payload length is limited to 4096 bytes. Any request to xenstored resulting in a response with a payload longer than 4096 bytes will result in an error. When registering a watch, the payload length limit applies to the combined length of the watched path and the specified tag. Because watches for a specific path are also triggered for all nodes below that path, the payload of a watch event message can be longer than the payload needed to register the watch. A malicious guest that registers a watch using a very large tag (i.e., with a registration operation payload length close to the 4096 byte limit) can cause the generation of watch events with a payload length larger than 4096 bytes, by writing to Xenstore entries below the watched path. This will result in an error condition in xenstored. This error can result in a NULL pointer dereference, leading to a crash of xenstored. A malicious guest administrator can cause xenstored to crash, leading to a denial of service. Following a xenstored crash, domains may continue to run, but management operations will be impossible. Only C xenstored is affected, oxenstored is not affected.
CVSS Score
6.0
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-12-15
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Nodes in xenstore have an ownership. In oxenstored, a owner could give a node away. However, node ownership has quota implications. Any guest can run another guest out of quota, or create an unbounded number of nodes owned by dom0, thus running xenstored out of memory A malicious guest administrator can cause a denial of service against a specific guest or against the whole host. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.
CVSS Score
6.0
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-12-15
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. In the Ocaml xenstored implementation, the internal representation of the tree has special cases for the root node, because this node has no parent. Unfortunately, permissions were not checked for certain operations on the root node. Unprivileged guests can get and modify permissions, list, and delete the root node. (Deleting the whole xenstore tree is a host-wide denial of service.) Achieving xenstore write access is also possible. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.
CVSS Score
8.8
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2020-12-15
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Some OSes (such as Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD) are processing watch events using a single thread. If the events are received faster than the thread is able to handle, they will get queued. As the queue is unbounded, a guest may be able to trigger an OOM in the backend. All systems with a FreeBSD, Linux, or NetBSD (any version) dom0 are vulnerable.
CVSS Score
6.5
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-12-15
An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 5.10.1, as used with Xen through 4.14.x. The Linux kernel PV block backend expects the kernel thread handler to reset ring->xenblkd to NULL when stopped. However, the handler may not have time to run if the frontend quickly toggles between the states connect and disconnect. As a consequence, the block backend may re-use a pointer after it was freed. A misbehaving guest can trigger a dom0 crash by continuously connecting / disconnecting a block frontend. Privilege escalation and information leaks cannot be ruled out. This only affects systems with a Linux blkback.
CVSS Score
8.8
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-12-15
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x allowing x86 HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service (stack corruption), cause a data leak, or possibly gain privileges because of an off-by-one error. NOTE: this issue is caused by an incorrect fix for CVE-2020-27671.
CVSS Score
8.8
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-11-24
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.
CVSS Score
4.4
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-11-10
An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 5.9.1, as used with Xen through 4.14.x. Guest OS users can cause a denial of service (host OS hang) via a high rate of events to dom0, aka CID-e99502f76271.
CVSS Score
5.5
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-10-22
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. x86 PV guest kernels can experience denial of service via SYSENTER. The SYSENTER instruction leaves various state sanitization activities to software. One of Xen's sanitization paths injects a #GP fault, and incorrectly delivers it twice to the guest. This causes the guest kernel to observe a kernel-privilege #GP fault (typically fatal) rather than a user-privilege #GP fault (usually converted into SIGSEGV/etc.). Malicious or buggy userspace can crash the guest kernel, resulting in a VM Denial of Service. All versions of Xen from 3.2 onwards are vulnerable. Only x86 systems are vulnerable. ARM platforms are not vulnerable. Only x86 systems that support the SYSENTER instruction in 64bit mode are vulnerable. This is believed to be Intel, Centaur, and Shanghai CPUs. AMD and Hygon CPUs are not believed to be vulnerable. Only x86 PV guests can exploit the vulnerability. x86 PVH / HVM guests cannot exploit the vulnerability.
CVSS Score
5.5
EPSS Score
0.0
Published
2020-09-23
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There is a lack of preemption in evtchn_reset() / evtchn_destroy(). In particular, the FIFO event channel model allows guests to have a large number of event channels active at a time. Closing all of these (when resetting all event channels or when cleaning up after the guest) may take extended periods of time. So far, there was no arrangement for preemption at suitable intervals, allowing a CPU to spend an almost unbounded amount of time in the processing of these operations. Malicious or buggy guest kernels can mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack affecting the entire system. All Xen versions are vulnerable in principle. Whether versions 4.3 and older are vulnerable depends on underlying hardware characteristics.
CVSS Score
5.5
EPSS Score
0.001
Published
2020-09-23