several HVM operations do not validate the range of their inputs

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Several HVM control operations do not check the size of their inputs and can tie up a physical CPU for extended periods of time. In addition dirty video RAM tracking involves clearing the bitmap provided by the domain controlling the guest e.g. dom0 or a stubdom. If the size of...

GhostRace: Speculative Race Conditions

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Researchers at VU Amsterdam and IBM Research have discovered GhostRace; an analysis of the behaviour of synchronisation primitives under speculative execution. Synchronisation primitives are typically formed as an unbounded loop which waits until a resource is available to be...

network backend may cause Linux netfront to use freed SKBs

ISSUE DESCRIPTION While adding logic to support XDP eXpress Data Path, a code label was moved in a way allowing for SKBs having references pointers retained for further processing to nevertheless be freed. IMPACT A misbehaving or malicious backend may cause a Denial of Service DoS in the guest...

Guest triggered use-after-free in Linux xen-netback

ISSUE DESCRIPTION A malicious or buggy network PV frontend can force Linux netback to disable the interface and terminate the receive kernel thread associated with queue 0 in response to the frontend sending a malformed packet. Such kernel thread termination will lead to a use-after-free in Linux...

p2m lock starvation

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The current read/write lock implementation is read-biased, which allows a consistent stream of readers to starve writers indefinitely. There are certain rwlocks where guests are capable of applying arbitrary read pressure. IMPACT A malicious guest administrator can deny service ...

Lock order reversal between page_alloc_lock and mm_rwlock

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The locks pagealloclock and mmrwlock are not always taken in the same order. This raises the possibility of deadlock. The incorrect order occurs only in the implementation of the deprecated domctl hypercall XENDOMCTLgetmemlist. IMPACT A malicious guest administrator may be able ...

Memory accessible by 64-bit PV guests under live migration

ISSUE DESCRIPTION On some hardware, during live migration of 64-bit PV guests, some parts of the guest's shadow pagetables are mistakenly filled in with hypervisor mappings. This causes Xen to crash when those mappings are later cleared. Before the crash, a malicious guest could use hypercalls to...

Several access permission issues with IRQs for unprivileged guests

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Various IRQ related access control operations may not have the intended effect, thus potentially permitting a stub domain to grant its client domain access to an IRQ it doesn't have access to itself. IMPACT Malicious or buggy stub domains kernels can mount a denial of service...

Linux: error handling issues in blkback's grant mapping

ISSUE DESCRIPTION To service requests, the driver maps grant references provided by the frontend. In this process, errors may be encountered. In one case an error encountered earlier might be discarded by later processing, resulting in the caller assuming successful mapping, and hence subsequent...

QEMU heap overflow flaw while processing certain ATAPI commands.

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The QEMU security team has predisclosed the following advisory: A heap overflow flaw was found in the way QEMU's IDE subsystem handled I/O buffer access while processing certain ATAPI commands. A privileged guest user in a guest with CDROM drive enabled could potentially use thi...

Vulnerabilities in HVM MSI injection

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The implementation of the HVM control operation HVMOPinjectmsi, while checking whether a particular IRQ was already set up in the necessary way, fails to properly check all respective conditions. In particular it doesn't check the returned pointer for being non-NULL before de-...

HVMOP_set_mem_type allows invalid P2M entries to be created

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The implementation in Xen of the HVMOPsetmemtype HVM control operations attempts to exclude transitioning a page from an inappropriate memory type. However, only an inadequate subset of memory types is excluded. There are certain other types that don't correspond to a particular...

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service DoS of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the...

multiple xenoprof issues

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Unprivileged guests can request to map xenoprof buffers, even if profiling has not been enabled for those guests. These buffers were not scrubbed. This is CVE-2020-11740. Furthermore, for guests for which "active" profiling was enabled by the administrator, the xenoprof code use...

grant transfer allows PV guest to elevate privileges

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The GNTTABOPtransfer operation allows one guest to transfer a page to another guest. The internal processing of this, however, does not include zapping the previous type of the page being transferred. This makes it possible for a PV guest to transfer a page previously used as pa...

cirrus_bitblt_cputovideo does not check if memory region is safe

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In CIRRUSBLTMODEMEMSYSSRC mode the bitblit copy routine cirrusbitbltcputovideo fails to check wethehr the specified memory region is safe. IMPACT A malicious guest administrator can cause an out of bounds memory write, very likely exploitable as a privilege escalation. VULNERABL...

Insufficient restrictions on certain MMU update hypercalls

ISSUE DESCRIPTION MMU update operations targeting page tables are intended to be used on PV guests only. The lack of a respective check made it possible for such operations to access certain function pointers which remain NULL when the target guest is using Hardware Assisted Paging HAP. IMPACT...

grant table hypercall acquire/release imbalance

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When releasing a non-v1 non-transitive grant after doing a grant copy operation, Xen incorrectly recurses as if for a transitive grant and releases an unrelated grant reference. IMPACT A malicious guest administrator can cause undefined behaviour; depending on the dom0 kernel a...

Nested HVM exposes host to being driven out of memory by guest

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Guests are currently permitted to enable nested virtualization on themselves. Missing error handling cleanup in the handling code makes it possible for a guest, particularly a multi-vCPU one, to repeatedly invoke this operation, thus causing a leak of - over time - unbounded...

Guest can force Linux netback driver to hog large amounts of kernel memory

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Incoming data packets for a guest in the Linux kernel's netback driver are buffered until the guest is ready to process them. There are some measures taken for avoiding to pile up too much data, but those can be bypassed by the guest: There is a timeout how long the client side ...

Unsanitised guest input in libxl device handling code

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Various parts of libxl device-handling code inappropriately use information from partially guest controlled areas of xenstore principally the frontend directory /local/domain/GUEST/device/TYPE/DEVID, henceforth referred to as FE. The problems vary by device type: For almost all...

x86: CPU lockup during exception delivery

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When a benign exception occurs while delivering another benign exception, it is architecturally specified that these would be delivered sequentially. There are, however, cases where this results in an infinite loop inside the CPU, which in the virtualized case can be broken only...

x86: Long latency populate-on-demand operation is not preemptible

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When running an HVM domain in Populate-on-Demand mode, Xen would sometimes search the domain for memory to reclaim, in response to demands for population of other pages in the same domain. This search runs without preemption. The guest can, by suitable arrangement of its memory...

libxl fails to honour readonly flag on disks with qemu-xen

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Callers of libxl can specify that a disk should be read-only to the guest. However, there is no code in libxl to pass this information to qemu-xen the upstream-based qemu; and indeed there is no way in qemu to make a disk read-only. The vulnerability is exploitable only via...

Several memory hypercall operations allow invalid extent order values

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Allowing arbitrary extentorder input values for XENMEMdecreasereservation, XENMEMpopulatephysmap, and XENMEMexchange can cause arbitrarily long time being spent in loops without allowing vital other code to get a chance to execute. This may also cause inconsistent state resultin...

IOMMU: RMRR (VT-d) and unity map (AMD-Vi) handling issues

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Certain PCI devices in a system might be assigned Reserved Memory Regions specified via Reserved Memory Region Reporting, "RMRR" for Intel VT-d or Unity Mapping ranges for AMD-Vi. These are typically used for platform tasks such as legacy USB emulation. Since the precise purpose...

x86: Speculative vulnerabilities with bare (non-shim) 32-bit PV guests

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 32-bit x86 PV guest kernels run in ring 1. At the time when Xen was developed, this area of the i386 architecture was rarely used, which is why Xen was able to use it to implement paravirtualisation, Xen's novel approach to virtualization. In AMD64, Xen had to use a different...

ARM guests may induce host asynchronous abort

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Depending on how the hardware and firmware have been integrated, guest-triggered asynchronous aborts SError on ARMv8 may be received by the hypervisor. The current action is to crash the host. A guest might trigger an asynchronous abort when accessing memory mapped hardware in a...

Long latency MMIO mapping operations are not preemptible

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The XENDOMCTLmemorymapping hypercall allows long running operations without implementing preemption. This hypercall is used by the device model as part of the emulation associated with configuration of PCI devices passed through to HVM guests and is therefore indirectly exposed ...

once valid event channels may not turn invalid

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Logic in the handling of event channel operations in Xen assumes that an event channel, once valid, will not become invalid over the life time of a guest. However, operations like the resetting of all event channels may involve decreasing one of the bounds checked when determini...

blkif responses leak backend stack data

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The block interface response structure has some discontiguous fields. Certain backends populate the structure fields of an otherwise uninitialized instance of this structure on their stacks, leaking data through the internal or trailing padding field. IMPACT A malicious...

Heap overflow in QEMU PCNET controller, allowing guest->host escape

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The QEMU security team has predisclosed the following advisory: pcnettransmit loads a transmit-frame descriptor from the guest into the /tmd/ local variable to recover a length field, a status field and a guest-physical location of the associated frame buffer. If the status fiel...

ocaml xenstored mishandles oversized message replies

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The Ocaml xenstored implementation "oxenstored" cannot correctly handle a message reply larger than XENSTOREPAYLOADSIZE when communicating with a client domain via the shared ring mechanism. When this situation occurs the connection to the client domain will be shutdown and cann...

Possible deadlock in Linux kernel event handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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...

x86 shadow paging arbitrary pointer dereference

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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. Due to too lax a check in one of the hypervisor routines used for shadow page handling it is possible for a guest...

x86: Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions

ISSUE DESCRIPTION It has been discovered that on some AMD CPUs, the RAS Return Address Stack, also called RAP - Return Address Predictor - in some AMD documentation, and RSB - Return Stack Buffer - in Intel terminology is dynamically partitioned between non-idle threads. This allows an attacker t...

x86: Multiple speculative security issues

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 1 Researchers have discovered that on some AMD CPUs, the implementation of IBPB Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier does not behave according to the specification. Specifically, IBPB fails to properly flush the RAS Return Address Stack, also RSB - Return Stack Buffer - in Intel...

Bad continuation handling in GNTTABOP_copy

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Grant table operations are expected to return 0 for success, and a negative number for errors. The fix for CVE-2017-12135 / XSA-226 introduced a path through grant copy handling where success may be returned to the caller without any action taken. In particular the status fields...

x86 task switch to VM86 mode mis-handled

ISSUE DESCRIPTION LDTR, just like TR, is purely a protected mode facility. Hence even when switching to a VM86 mode task, LDTR loading needs to follow protected mode semantics. This was violated by the code. IMPACT On SVM AMD hardware: a malicious unprivileged guest process can escalate its...

Excessive checking in compatibility mode hypercall argument translation

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The hypercall argument translation needed for 32-bit guests running on 64-bit hypervisors performs checks on the final register state. These checks cover all registers potentially holding hypercall arguments, not just the ones actually doing so for the hypercall being processed,...

ARM hypervisor crash on guest interrupt controller access

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When handling a guest access to the virtual GIC distributor interrupt controller Xen could dereference a pointer before checking it for validity leading to a hypervisor crash and host Denial of Service. IMPACT A buggy or malicious guest can crash the host. VULNERABLE SYSTEMS Bot...

Xen PV DoS vulnerability with SYSENTER

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The SYSENTER instruction can be used by PV guests to accelerate system call processing. This instruction, however, leaves the EFLAGS register mostly unmodified - in particular, the NT flag doesn't get cleared. If the hypervisor subsequently uses IRET to return to the guest which...

x86: shadow stack vs exceptions from emulation stubs

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Recent x86 CPUs offer functionality named Control-flow Enforcement Technology CET. A sub-feature of this are Shadow Stacks CET-SS. CET-SS is a hardware feature designed to protect against Return Oriented Programming attacks. When enabled, traditional stacks holding both data and...

Linux PV device frontends vulnerable to attacks by backends

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Several Linux PV device frontends are using the grant table interfaces for removing access rights of the backends in ways being subject to race conditions, resulting in potential data leaks, data corruption by malicious backends, and denial of service triggered by malicious...

insufficient cache write-back under VT-d

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When page tables are shared between IOMMU and CPU, changes to them require flushing of both TLBs. Furthermore, IOMMUs may be non-coherent, and hence prior to flushing IOMMU TLBs CPU cached also needs writing back to memory after changes were made. Such writing back of cached dat...

Unmediated PCI register access in qemu

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Qemu allows guests to not only read, but also write all parts of the PCI config space but not extended config space of passed through PCI devices not explicitly dealt with for partial emulation purposes. IMPACT Since the effect depends on the specific purpose of the the config...

use-after-free in xc_cpupool_getinfo() under memory pressure

ISSUE DESCRIPTION If xccpumapalloc fails then xccpupoolgetinfo will free and incorrectly return the then-free pointer to the result structure. IMPACT An attacker may be able to cause a multi-threaded toolstack using this function to race against itself leading to heap corruption and a potential...

VT-d interrupt remapping source validation flaw for bridges

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Interrupt remapping table entries for MSI interrupts set up by bridge devices did not get any source validation set up on them, allowing misbehaving or malicious guests to inject interrupts into the domain owning the bridges. In a typical Xen system bridge devices are owned by...

arm: Guests can trigger a deadlock on Cortex-A77

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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 Regist...

lock order inversion in transitive grant copy handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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, b...