x86: inconsistent cachability flags on guest mappings

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Multiple mappings of the same physical page with different cachability setting can cause problems. While one category risk of using stale data affects only guests themselves and hence avoiding this can be left for them to control, the other category being Machine Check exception...

XENMEM_exchange error handling issues

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Error handling in the operation may involve handing back pages to the domain. This operation may fail when in parallel the domain gets torn down. So far this failure unconditionally resulted in the host being brought down due to an internal error being assumed. This is...

QEMU leak of uninitialized heap memory in rtl8139 device model

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The QEMU model of the RTL8139 network card did not sufficiently validate inputs in the C+ mode offload emulation. This results in uninitialised memory from the QEMU process's heap being leaked to the domain as well as to the network. IMPACT A guest may be able to read sensitive...

Long latency virtual-mmu operations are not preemptible

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Some MMU virtualization operations on HVM guests must process every page assigned to a guest. For larger guests, this can tie up a vcpu for a significant amount of time, as the operations are not preemptible. For guests using Hardware Assisted Paging HAP, see below this is...

Hardware features unintentionally exposed to guests on ARM

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When running on an ARM platform Xen was not correctly configuring the hardware virtualisation platform and therefore did not prevent guests from accessing various hardware features including cache control, coprocessors, debug registers and various processor specific registers...

x86/AMD: Zenbleed

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Researchers at Google have discovered Zenbleed, a hardware bug causing corruption of the vector registers. When a VZEROUPPER instruction is discarded as part of a bad transient execution path, its effect on internal tracking are not unwound correctly. This manifests as the wrong...

certain VT-d IOMMUs may not work in shared page table mode

ISSUE DESCRIPTION For efficiency reasons, address translation control structures page tables may and, on suitable hardware, by default will be shared between CPUs, for second-level translation EPT, and IOMMUs. These page tables are presently set up to always be 4 levels deep. However, an IOMMU ma...

race when migrating timers between x86 HVM vCPU-s

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When migrating timers of x86 HVM guests between its vCPU-s, the locking model used allows for a second vCPU of the same guest also operating on the timers to release a lock that it didn't acquire. IMPACT The most likely effect of the issue is a hang or crash of the hypervisor,...

arm: vgic: Out-of-bound access when sending SGIs

ISSUE DESCRIPTION ARM guests can send SGI i.e. IPI targeting a list of vCPUs using the MMIO register GICDSGIR GICv2 or System Register ICCSGI1R GICv3. However, the emulation code does not sanitize the list and will directly access an array without checking whether the array index is within bounds...

arm: Host crash caused by VMID exhaustion

ISSUE DESCRIPTION VMIDs are a finite hardware resource, and allocated as part of domain creation. If no free VMIDs are available when trying to create a new domain, a bug in the error path causes a NULL pointer to be used, resulting in a Data Abort and host crash. IMPACT Attempting to create too...

Unsanitised driver domain input in libxl device handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION libxl's device-handling code freely uses and trusts information from the backend directories in xenstore. The backend domain driver domain can store bogus data in the backend, causing libxl's enquiry functions to fail, confusing management tools. A driver domain can also remove...

arm: Race between domain destruction and memory allocation decrease

ISSUE DESCRIPTION While freeing the memory associated with a domain during domain destruction Xen could race with a toolstack domain reducing the amount of memory associated with that same domain via the XENMEMdecreasereservation. In the case where this race is hit the host will crash. The race i...

Use after free in QEMU/Xen block unplug protocol

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When unplugging an emulated block device the device was not fully unplugged, meaning a second unplug attempt would attempt to unplug the device a second time using a previously freed pointer. IMPACT An HVM guest which has access to an emulated IDE disk device may be able to...

Linux netback crash trying to disable due to malformed packet

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When Linux's netback sees a malformed packet, it tries to disable the interface which serves the misbehaving frontend. This involves taking a mutex, which might sleep. But in recent versions of Linux the guest transmit path is handled by NAPI in softirq context, where sleeping i...

x86: speculative vulnerability in 32bit SYSCALL path

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Due to an oversight in the very original Spectre/Meltdown security work XSA-254, one entrypath performs its speculation-safety actions too late. In some configurations, there is an unprotected RET instruction which can be attacked with a variety of speculative attacks. IMPACT An...

out of bounds event channels available to 32-bit x86 domains

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The so called 2-level event channel model imposes different limits on the number of usable event channels for 32-bit x86 domains vs 64-bit or Arm either bitness ones. 32-bit x86 domains can use only 1023 channels, due to limited space in their shared between guest and Xen...

races with evtchn_reset()

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Uses of EVTCHNOPreset potentially by a guest on itself or XENDOMCTLsoftreset by itself covered by XSA-77 can lead to the violation of various internal assumptions. This may lead to out of bounds memory accesses or triggering of bug checks. IMPACT In particular x86 PV guests may ...

x86 HVM: Overflow of sh_ctxt->seg_reg[]

ISSUE DESCRIPTION x86 HVM guests running with shadow paging use a subset of the x86 emulator to handle the guest writing to its own pagetables. There are situations a guest can provoke which result in exceeding the space allocated for internal state. IMPACT A malicious HVM guest administrator can...

long running memory operations on ARM

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Certain HYPERVISORmemoryop subops take page order inputs, with so far insufficient enforcement of limits thereof. In particular, for all of XENMEMincreasereservation, XENMEMpopulatephysmap, and XENMEMexchange the order was limited to 9 only for guests without physical devices...

IOMMU page mapping issues on x86

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Both AMD and Intel allow ACPI tables to specify regions of memory which should be left untranslated, which typically means these addresses should pass the translation phase unaltered. While these are typically device specific ACPI properties, they can also be specified to apply ...

xen/arm: Boot modules are not scrubbed

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The bootloader will load boot modules e.g. kernel, initramfs... in a temporary area before they are copied by Xen to each domain memory. To ensure sensitive data is not leaked from the modules, Xen must "scrub" them before handing the page over to the allocator. Unfortunately, i...

undue recursion in x86 HVM context switch code

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When they require assistance from the device model, x86 HVM guests must be temporarily de-scheduled. The device model will signal Xen when it has completed its operation, via an event channel, so that the relevant vCPU is rescheduled. If the device model were to signal Xen witho...

Linux ioperm bitmap context switching issues

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Linux 5.5 overhauled the internal state handling for the iopl and ioperm system calls. Unfortunately, one aspect on context switch wasn't wired up correctly for the Xen PVOps case. IMPACT IO port permissions don't get rescinded when context switching to an unprivileged task...

Races in the grant table unmap code

ISSUE DESCRIPTION We have discovered two bugs in the code unmapping grant references. When a grant had been mapped twice by a backend domain, and then unmapped by two concurrent unmap calls, the frontend may be informed that the page had no further mappings when the first call completed rather th...

Insufficient TLB flushing in VT-d (iommu) code

ISSUE DESCRIPTION An inverted boolean parameter resulted in TLB flushes not happening upon clearing of a present translation table entry. Retaining stale TLB entries could allow guests access to memory that ought to have been revoked, or grant greater access than intended. IMPACT Malicious guest...

Xen hypercall page unsafe against speculative attacks

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Xen guests need to use different processor instructions to make explicit calls into the Xen hypervisor depending on guest type and/or CPU vendor. In order to hide those differences, the hypervisor can fill a hypercall page with the needed instruction sequences, allowing the gues...

VT-d: Failure to quarantine devices in !HVM builds

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Incorrect placement of a preprocessor directive in source code results in logic that doesn't operate as intended when support for HVM guests is compiled out of Xen. IMPACT When a device is removed from a domain, it is not properly quarantined and retains its access to the domain...

x86: TSX Async Abort protections not restored after S3

ISSUE DESCRIPTION This issue relates to the TSX Async Abort speculative security vulnerability. Please see https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-305.html for details. Mitigating TAA by disabling TSX the default and preferred option requires selecting a non-default setting in MSRTSXCTRL. This setti...

NULL pointer deref in event channel poll

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When polling event channels, in general arbitrary port numbers can be specified. Specifically, there is no requirement that a polled event channel ports has ever been created. When the code was generalised from an earlier implementation, introducing some intermediate pointers, a...

x86: Mishandling of instruction pointer truncation during emulation

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When emulating HVM instructions, Xen uses a small i-cache for fetches from guest memory. The code that handles cache misses does not check if the address from which it fetched lies within the cache before blindly writing to it. As such it is possible for the guest to overwrite...

Hypervisor heap contents leaked to guests

ISSUE DESCRIPTION While memory pages recovered from dying guests are being cleaned to avoid leaking sensitive information to other guests, memory pages that were in use by the hypervisor and are eligible to be allocated to guests weren't being properly cleaned. Such exposure of information would...

Excessive time to disable caching with HVM guests with PCI passthrough

ISSUE DESCRIPTION HVM guests are able to manipulate their physical address space such that processing a subsequent request by that guest to disable caches takes an extended amount of time changing the cachability of the memory pages assigned to this guest. This applies only when the guest has bee...

x86: BTC/SRSO fixes not fully effective

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The fixes for XSA-422 Branch Type Confusion and XSA-434 Speculative Return Stack Overflow are not IRQ-safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled. However, the original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown XPTI deliberately left interrupts enabl...

inappropriate x86 IOMMU timeout detection / handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION IOMMUs process commands issued to them in parallel with the operation of the CPUs issuing such commands. In the current implementation in Xen, asynchronous notification of the completion of such commands is not used. Instead, the issuing CPU spin-waits for the completion of the...

XAPI: guest-triggered excessive memory usage

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Certain xenstore keys provide feedback from the guest, and are therefore watched by toolstack. Specifically, keys are watched by xenopsd, and data are forward via RPC through message-switch to xapi. The watching logic in xenopsd sends one RPC update containing all data, any time...

stale P2M mappings due to insufficient error checking

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Certain actions require 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. If...

qemu incautious about shared ring processing

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The compiler can emit optimizations in qemu which can lead to double fetch vulnerabilities. Specifically data on the rings shared between qemu and the hypervisor which the guest under control can obtain mappings of can be fetched twice during which time the guest can alter the...

GNTTABOP_swap_grant_ref operation misbehavior

ISSUE DESCRIPTION With the introduction of version 2 grant table operations, a version check became necessary for most grant table related hypercalls. The GNTTABOPswapgrantref call was lacking such a check. As a result, the subsequent code behaved as if version 2 was in use, when a guest issued...

integer overflow in several XSM/Flask hypercalls

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The FLASKGET,SETBOOL, FLASKUSER and FLASKCONTEXTTOSID suboperations of the flask hypercall are vulnerable to an integer overflow on the input size. The hypercalls attempt to allocate a buffer which is 1 larger than this size and is therefore vulnerable to integer overflow and an...

Buffer overflow in xencontrol Python bindings affecting xend

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The Python bindings for the xcvcpusetaffinity call do not properly check their inputs. Systems which allow untrusted administrators to configure guest vcpu affinity may be exploited to trigger a buffer overrun and corrupt memory. IMPACT An attacker who is able to configure a...

several hypercalls do not validate input GFNs

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The function getpagefromgfn does not validate its input GFN. An invalid GFN passed to a hypercall which uses this function will cause the hypervisor to read off the end of the frame table and potentially crash. IMPACT A malicious guest administrator of a PV guest can cause Xen t...

x86: Native Branch History Injection

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In August 2022, researchers at VU Amsterdam disclosed Spectre-BHB. Spectre-BHB was discussed in XSA-398. At the time, the susceptibility of Xen to Spectre-BHB was uncertain so no specific action was taken in XSA-398. However, various changes were made thereafter in upstream Xen ...

Multiple vulnerabilities in libfsimage disk handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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...

Guests can trigger deadlock in Linux netback driver

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The patch for XSA-392 introduced another issue which might result in a deadlock when trying to free the SKB of a packet dropped due to the XSA-392 handling CVE-2022-42328. Additionally when dropping packages for other reasons the same deadlock could occur in case of netpoll bein...

P2M pool freeing may take excessively long

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The P2M pool backing second level address translation for guests may be of significant size. Therefore its freeing may take more time than is reasonable without intermediate preemption checks. Such checking for the need to preempt was so far missing. IMPACT A group of...

inadequate grant-v2 status frames array bounds check

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The v2 grant table interface separates grant attributes from grant status. That is, when operating in this mode, a guest has two tables. As a result, guests also need to be able to retrieve the addresses that the new status tracking table can be accessed through. For 32-bit gues...

stack corruption from XSA-346 change

ISSUE DESCRIPTION One of the two changes for XSA-346 introduced an on-stack array. The check for guarding against overrunning this array was off by one, allowing for corruption of the first stack slot immediately following this array. IMPACT A malicious or buggy HVM or PVH guest can cause Xen to...

undue deferral of IOMMU TLB flushes

ISSUE DESCRIPTION To efficiently change the physical to machine address mappings of a larger range of addresses for fully virtualized guests, Xen contains an optimization to coalesce per-page IOMMU TLB flushes into a single, wider flush after all adjustments have been made. While this is fine to ...

Off-by-one error in FLASK_AVC_CACHESTAT hypercall

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The FLASKAVCCACHESTAT hypercall, which provides access to per-cpu statistics on the Flask security policy, incorrectly validates the CPU for which statistics are being requested. IMPACT An attacker can cause the hypervisor to read past the end of an array. This may result in...

Multiple vulnerabilities in libelf PV kernel handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The ELF parser used by the Xen tools to read domains' kernels and construct domains has multiple integer overflows, pointer dereferences based on calculations from unchecked input values, and other problems. This corresponds to the following CVEs: CVE-2013-2194 XEN XSA-55 intege...