qemu-dm buffer overrun in MSI-X handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION "qemu-xen-traditional" aka qemu-dm tracks state for each MSI-X table entry of a passed through device. This is used/updated on intercepted accesses to the pages containing the MSI-X table. There may be space on the final page not covered by any MSI-X table entry, but memory for...

x86: populate-on-demand balloon size inaccuracy can crash guests

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The design of the memory populate-on-demand PoD system requires that a guest's memory ballooning driver reach its memory reduction target. The target is not entirely well-defined in terms of the information visible to the appropriate parts of the system, so some unknown set of...

Missing privilege level checks in x86 emulation of far branches

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The emulation of far branch instructions CALL, JMP, and RETF in Intel assembly syntax, LCALL, LJMP, and LRET in AT&T assembly syntax incompletely performs privilege checks. However these instructions are not usually handled by the emulator. Exceptions to this are - when a memory...

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...

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...

Missing privilege level checks in x86 emulation of software interrupts

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The emulation of instructions which generate software interrupts fails to perform supervisor mode permission checks. However these instructions are not usually handled by the emulator. Exceptions to this are - when a memory operand implicit for the affected instructions lives in...

Linux disk/nic frontends data leaks

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Linux Block and Network PV device frontends don't zero memory regions before sharing them with the backend CVE-2022-26365, CVE-2022-33740. Additionally the granularity of the grant table doesn't allow sharing less than a 4K page, leading to unrelated data residing in the same 4K...

x86 pv: Insufficient care with non-coherent mappings

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Xen maintains a type reference count for pages, in addition to a regular reference count. This scheme is used to maintain invariants required for Xen's safety, e.g. PV guests may not have direct writeable access to pagetables; updates need auditing by Xen. Unfortunately, Xen's...

Linux: display frontend "be-alloc" mode is unsupported

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The backend allocation mode of Linux'es drmxenfront drivers was not meant to be a supported configuration, but this wasn't stated accordingly in its support status entry. IMPACT Use of the feature may have unknown effects. VULNERABLE SYSTEMS Linux versions from 4.18 onwards are...

virtio: unbounded memory allocation issue

ISSUE DESCRIPTION A guest can submit virtio requests without bothering to wait for completion and is therefore not bound by virtqueue size. This requires reusing vring descriptors in more than one request, which is incorrect but possible. Processing a request allocates a VirtQueueElement and...

x86: Privilege escalation in PV guests

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The PV pagetable code has fast-paths for making updates to pre-existing pagetable entries, to skip expensive re-validation in safe cases e.g. clearing only Access/Dirty bits. The bits considered safe were too broad, and not actually safe. IMPACT A malicous PV guest administrator...

Information leak through XEN_DOMCTL_gettscinfo

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The handler for XENDOMCTLgettscinfo failed to initialize a padding field subsequently copied to guest memory. A similar bug existed in XENSYSCTLgetdomaininfolist, which is addressed by the patches provided here even though that operation was declared by XSA-77 not to provide...

Grant table version switch list corruption vulnerability

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Downgrading the grant table version of a guest involves freeing its status pages. This freeing was incomplete - the pages are freed back to the allocator, but not removed from the domain's tracking list. This would cause list corruption, eventually leading to a hypervisor crash...

xenstored: A transaction conflict can crash C Xenstored

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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 Xenstor...

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...

Missing unlock in XENMEM_acquire_resource error path

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The RCU Read, Copy, Update mechanism is a synchronisation primitive. A buggy error path in the XENMEMacquireresource exits without releasing an RCU reference, which is conceptually similar to forgetting to unlock a spinlock. IMPACT A buggy or malicious HVM stubdomain can cause a...

Load Value Injection (LVI) speculative side channel

ISSUE DESCRIPTION This is very closely related to the Microarchitectural Data Sampling vulnerabilities from May 2019. Please see https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-297.html for details about MDS. A new way of using the micro-architectural details behind MDS has been identified. Instead of simpl...

guest 32-bit ELF symbol table load leaking host data

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Along with their main kernel binary, unprivileged guests may arrange to have their Xen environment load kernel symbol tables for their use. The ELF image metadata created for this purpose has a few unused bytes when the symbol table binary is in 32-bit ELF format. These unused...

x86 shadow pagetables: address width overflow

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In the x86 shadow pagetable code, the guest frame number of a superpage mapping is stored in a 32-bit field. If a shadowed guest can cause a superpage mapping of a guest-physical address at or above 2^44 to be shadowed, the top bits of the address will be lost, causing an...

Information leak through fbld instruction emulation

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The emulation of the fbld instruction which is used during I/O emulation uses the wrong variable for the source effective address. As a result, the actual address used is an uninitialised bit pattern from the stack. A malicious guest might be able to find out information about t...

Hypervisor crash due to incorrect ASSERT (debug build only)

ISSUE DESCRIPTION A change to an internal interface within the hypervisor invalidated an ASSERT in a caller of that API. This code path is exposed to PV guests via a hypercall allowing administrators of PV guests to crash the hypervisor if it is built with debugging enabled. IMPACT Malicious...

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...

Rogue backends can cause DoS of guests via high frequency events

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Xen offers the ability to run PV backends in regular unprivileged guests, typically referred to as "driver domains". Running PV backends in driver domains has one primary security advantage: if a driver domain gets compromised, it doesn't have the privileges to take over the...

x86: broken check in memory_exchange() permits PV guest breakout

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The XSA-29 fix introduced an insufficient check on XENMEMexchange input, allowing the caller to drive hypervisor memory accesses outside of the guest provided input/output arrays. IMPACT A malicious or buggy 64-bit PV guest may be able to access all of system memory, allowing fo...

arm: vgic-v2: GICD_SGIR is not properly emulated

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When decoding a guest write to a specific register in the virtual interrupt controller Xen would treat an invalid value as a critical error and crash the host. IMPACT By writing an invalid value to the GICD.SGIR register a guest can crash the host, resulting in a Denial of Servi...

Improper MSR range used for x2APIC emulation

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The MSR range specified for APIC use in the x2APIC access model spans 256 MSRs. Hypervisor code emulating read and write accesses to these MSRs erroneously covered 1024 MSRs. While the write emulation path is written such that accesses to the extra MSRs would not have any bad...

Mishandling of uninitialised FIFO-based event channel control blocks

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When using the FIFO-based event channels, there are no checks for the existence of a control block when binding an event or moving it to a different VCPU. This is because events may be bound when the ABI is in 2-level mode e.g., by the toolstack before the domain is started. The...

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...

oxenstored incorrect handling of certain Xenbus ring states

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The oxenstored daemon the ocaml version of the xenstore daemon does not correctly handle unusual or malicious contents in the xenstore ring. A malicious guest can exploit this to cause oxenstored to read past the end of the ring and very likely crash or to allocate large amounts...

Rogue guests can cause DoS of Dom0 via high frequency events

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The handling of Xen events in the Linux kernel runs with interrupts disabled in a loop until no further event is pending. Whenever an event has been accepted by the kernel, another event can come in via the same event channel. This can result in the event handling loop running f...

x86 null segments not always treated as unusable

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The Xen x86 emulator erroneously failed to consider the unusability of segments when performing memory accesses. The intended behaviour is as follows: The user data segment %ds, %es, %fs and %gs selectors may be NULL in 32-bit to prevent access. In 64-bit, NULL has a special...

Information leak on AVX and/or LWP capable CPUs

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When a guest increases the set of extended state components for a vCPU saved/ restored via XSAVE/XRSTOR to date this can only be the upper halves of YMM registers, or AMD's LWP state after already having touched other extended registers restored via XRSTOR e.g. floating point or...

x86/AMD: mismatch in IOMMU quarantine page table levels

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The current setup of the quarantine page tables assumes that the quarantine domain domio has been initialized with an address width of DEFAULTDOMAINADDRESSWIDTH 48 and hence 4 page table levels. However domio being a PV domain gets the AMD-Vi IOMMU page tables levels based on th...

IRQ vector leak on x86

ISSUE DESCRIPTION An x86 HVM guest with PCI pass through devices can force the allocation of all IDT vectors on the system by rebooting itself with MSI or MSI-X capabilities enabled and entries setup. Such reboots will leak any vectors used by the MSI-X entries that the guest might had enabled, a...

Xenstore: guests can crash xenstored via watchs

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When a Xenstore watch fires, the xenstore client which registered the watch will receive a Xenstore message containing the path of the modified Xenstore entry which triggered the watch, and the tag which was specified when registering the watch. Any communication with xenstored ...

x86: missing NULL pointer check in VMFUNC emulation

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When support for the Intel VMX VMFUNC leaf 0 was added, a new optional function pointer hvmemulvmfunc was added to the hvmemulateops table. As is intended, that new function pointer is NULL on non-VMX hardware, including AMD SVM hardware. However at a call site, the necessary NU...

delimiter injection vulnerabilities in pygrub

ISSUE DESCRIPTION pygrub, the boot loader emulator, fails to quote or sanity check its results when reporting them to its caller. pygrub supports a number of output formats. When the S-expression output format is requested, putting string quotes and S-expressions in the bootloader configuration...

Intel VT-d Interrupt Remapping engines can be evaded by native NMI interrupts

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Message Signaled Interrupts MSI interrupts on Intel platforms are defined as DWORD writes to a special address location 0xFEE?????. MSIs on Intel Platforms supporting VT-d have two defined formats - Remappable format interrupts, and Compatibility not remappable format interrupts...

arm: The cache may not be cleaned for newly allocated scrubbed pages

ISSUE DESCRIPTION On Arm, a guest is allowed to control whether memory access bypass the cache. This means that Xen needs to ensure that all writes such as the ones during scrubbing have reached memory before handing over the page to a guest. Unfortunately the operation to clean the cache happens...

Special Register Buffer speculative side channel

ISSUE DESCRIPTION This issue is related to the MDS and TAA vulnerabilities. Please see https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-297.html MDS and https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-305.html TAA for details. Certain processor operations microarchitecturally need to read data from outside the physical...

x86 software guest page walk PS bit handling flaw

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The Page Size PS page table entry bit exists at all page table levels other than L1. Its meaning is reserved in L4, and conditionally reserved in L3 and L2 depending on hardware capabilities. The software page table walker in the hypervisor, however, so far ignored that bit in L...

x86: some pmu and profiling hypercalls log without rate limiting

ISSUE DESCRIPTION HYPERCALLxenoprofop and HYPERVISORxenpmuop log some errors and attempts at invalid operations. These log messages are not rate-limited, even though they can be triggered by guests. IMPACT A malicious guest could cause repeated logging to the hypervisor console, leading to a Deni...

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...

race in VT-d domain ID cleanup

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Xen domain IDs are up to 15 bits wide. VT-d hardware may allow for only less than 15 bits to hold a domain ID associating a physical device with a particular domain. Therefore internally Xen domain IDs are mapped to the smaller value range. The cleaning up of the housekeeping...

infinite loop when cleaning up IRQ vectors

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When moving IRQs between CPUs to distribute the load of IRQ handling, IRQ vectors are dynamically allocated and de-allocated on the relevant CPUs. De-allocation has to happen when certain constraints are met. If these conditions are not met when first checked, the checking CPU m...

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...

grant table operations mishandle reference counts

ISSUE DESCRIPTION We have discovered a number of bugs in the code mapping and unmapping grant references. If a grant is mapped with both the GNTMAPdevicemap and GNTMAPhostmap flags, but unmapped only with hostmap, the devicemap portion remains but the page reference counts are lowered as though i...

qemu SCSI REPORT LUNS buffer overflow

ISSUE DESCRIPTION qemu contains a possible buffer overflow in the SCSI code that implements the REPORT LUNS command. The buffer can be overflowed by creating a SCSI controller with more than 256 attached devices such as disks and sending a REPORT LUNS command with a short transfer buffer less tha...

Hypervisor crash due to missing exception recovery on XSETBV

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Processors do certain validity checks on the register values passed to XSETBV. For the PV emulation path for that instruction the hypervisor code didn't check for certain invalid bit combinations, thus exposing itself to a fault occurring when invoking that instruction on behalf...

Several long latency operations are not preemptible

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Page table manipulation operations for PV guests can take significant amounts of time, as they require all present branches to have their type and thus contents verified. While the most frequently used operations had been made preemptible in the past, some code paths involving...