Linux privcmd driver can circumvent kernel lockdown

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The Linux kernel's privcmd driver can be abused to circumvent kernel lockdown secure boot, e.g. by modifying page tables to enable user mode to modify kernel memory. IMPACT An administrator of an unprivileged guest booted in secure mode is able to perform actions on the kernel...

Use after free of paging structures in EPT

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The Intel EPT paging code uses an optimization to defer flushing of any cached EPT state until the p2m lock is dropped, so that multiple modifications done under the same locked region only issue a single flush. Freeing of paging structures however is not deferred until the...

Xenstored DoS by unprivileged domain

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Any guest issuing a Xenstore command accessing a node using the illegal node path "/local/domain/", will crash xenstored due to a clobbered error indicator in xenstored when verifying the node path. Note that the crash is forced via a failing assert statement in xenstored. In ca...

x86: incomplete IBPB for vCPU isolation

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In the context switch logic Xen attempts to skip an IBPB in the case of a vCPU returning to a CPU on which it was the previous vCPU to run. While safe for Xen's isolation between vCPUs, this prevents the guest kernel correctly isolating between tasks. Consider: 1 vCPU runs on CP...

x86: buffer overrun with shadow paging + tracing

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Shadow mode tracing code uses a set of per-CPU variables to avoid cumbersome parameter passing. Some of these variables are written to with guest controlled data, of guest controllable size. That size can be larger than the variable, and bounding of the writes was missing. IMPAC...

varstored: TOCTOU issues with mapped guest memory

ISSUE DESCRIPTION varstored is a component of the Xapi toolstack handling UEFI Variables for a VM. It has a communication path with OVMF inside the VM involving mapping a buffer prepared by OVMF. Within varstored, there were insufficient compiler barriers, creating TOCTOU issues with data in the...

Incorrect removal of permissions on PCI device unplug

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When passing through PCI devices, the detach logic in libxl won't remove access permissions to any 64bit memory BARs the device might have. As a result a domain can still have access any 64bit memory BAR when such device is no longer assigned to the domain. For PV domains the...

x86: Incorrect input sanitisation in Viridian hypercalls

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Some Viridian hypercalls can specify a mask of vCPU IDs as an input, in one of three formats. Xen has boundary checking bugs with all three formats, which can cause out-of-bounds reads and writes while processing the inputs. CVE-2025-58147. Hypercalls using the HVVPSET Sparse...

XAPI UTF-8 string handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION There are multiple issues. 1. Updates to the XAPI database sanitise input strings, but try generating the notification using the unsanitised input. This causes the database's event thread to terminate and cease further processing. 2. XAPI's UTF-8 encoder implements v3.0 of the...

Arm issues with page refcounting

ISSUE DESCRIPTION There are two issues related to the mapping of pages belonging to other domains: For one, an assertion is wrong there, where the case actually needs handling. A NULL pointer de-reference could result on a release build. This is CVE-2025-58144. And then the P2M lock isn't held...

Mutiple vulnerabilities in the Viridian interface

ISSUE DESCRIPTION There are multiple issues related to the handling and accessing of guest memory pages in the viridian code: 1. A NULL pointer dereference in the updating of the reference TSC area. This is CVE-2025-27466. 2. A NULL pointer dereference by assuming the SIM page is mapped when a...

x86: Transitive Scheduler Attacks

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Researchers from Microsoft and ETH Zurich have discovered several new speculative sidechannel attacks which bypass current protections. They are detailed in a paper titled "Enter, Exit, Page Fault, Leak: Testing Isolation Boundaries for Microarchitectural Leaks". Two issues, whi...

x86: Incorrect stubs exception handling for flags recovery

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Certain instructions need intercepting and emulating by Xen. In some cases Xen emulates the instruction by replaying it, using an executable stub. Some instructions may raise an exception, which is supposed to be handled gracefully. Certain replayed instructions have additional...

WinPVDrivers: Excessive permissions on user-exposed devices

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The Windows PV drivers expose various facilities to userspace. Several of these have no security descriptor, and are therefore fully accessible to unprivileged users. These are: 1. XenCons, CVE-2025-27462 2. XenIface, CVE-2025-27463 3. XenBus, CVE-2025-27464 IMPACT Unprivileged...

x86: Indirect Target Selection

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Researchers at VU Amsterdam have released Training Solo, detailing several speculative attacks which bypass current protections. One issue, which Intel have named Indirect Target Selection, is a bug in the hardware support for prediction-domain isolation. The mitigation for this...

deadlock potential with VT-d and legacy PCI device pass-through

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When setting up interrupt remapping for legacy PCI-X devices, including PCI-X bridges, a lookup of the upstream bridge is required. This lookup, itself involving acquiring of a lock, is done in a context where acquiring that lock is unsafe. This can lead to a deadlock. IMPACT Th...

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...

Backend can crash Linux netfront

ISSUE DESCRIPTION After a suspend/resume cycle of a Linux guest e.g. via "virsh dompmsuspend"/ "virsh dompmwakeup" a malicious network backend can crash the guest via a NULL-pointer dereference in the guest's xen-netfront driver. During the resume operation the xen-netfront driver will release so...

libxl leaks data to PVH guests via ACPI tables

ISSUE DESCRIPTION PVH guests have their ACPI tables constructed by the toolstack. The construction involves building the tables in local memory, which are then copied into guest memory. While actually used parts of the local memory are filled in correctly, excess space that is being allocated is...

Deadlock in x86 HVM standard VGA handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM guests, when the virtual VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a...

x86: Deadlock in vlapic_error()

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In x86's APIC Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller architecture, error conditions are reported in a status register. Furthermore, the OS can opt to receive an interrupt when a new error occurs. It is possible to configure the error interrupt with an illegal vector, which...

error handling in x86 IOMMU identity mapping

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...

PCI device pass-through with shared resources

ISSUE DESCRIPTION When multiple devices share resources and one of them is to be passed through to a guest, security of the entire system and of respective guests individually cannot really be guaranteed without knowing internals of any of the involved guests. Therefore such a configuration canno...

Xapi: Metadata injection attack against backup/restore functionality

ISSUE DESCRIPTION For a brief summary of Xapi terminology, see: https://xapi-project.github.io/xen-api/overview.htmlobject-model-overview Xapi contains functionality to backup and restore metadata about Virtual Machines and Storage Repositories SRs. The metadata itself is stored in a Virtual Disk...

double unlock in x86 guest IRQ handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION An optional feature of PCI MSI called "Multiple Message" allows a device to use multiple consecutive interrupt vectors. Unlike for MSI-X, the setting up of these consecutive vectors needs to happen all in one go. In this handling an error path could be taken in different...

Linux/xen-netfront: Memory leak due to missing cleanup function

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In netfront, xennetalloconerxbuffer failed to call the appropriate clean-up function, resulting in a memory leak. IMPACT A malicious guest userspace process can exhaust memory resources within the guest kernel, potentially leading to a guest crash Denial of Service. It is not...

x86: Incorrect logic for BTC/SRSO mitigations

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Because of a logical error in XSA-407 Branch Type Confusion, the mitigation is not applied properly when it is intended to be used. XSA-434 Speculative Return Stack Overflow uses the same infrastructure, so is equally impacted. For more details, see:...

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 ...

x86 HVM hypercalls may trigger Xen bug check

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Unlike 32-bit PV guests, HVM guests may switch freely between 64-bit and other modes. This in particular means that they may set registers used to pass 32-bit-mode hypercall arguments to values outside of the range 32-bit code would be able to set them to. When processing of...

x86: Register File Data Sampling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Intel have disclosed RFDS, Register File Data Sampling, affecting some Atom cores. This came from internal validation work. There is no information provided about how an attacker might go about inferring data from the register files. For more details, see:...

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...

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...

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...

pci: phantom functions assigned to incorrect contexts

ISSUE DESCRIPTION PCI devices can make use of a functionality called phantom functions, that when enabled allows the device to generate requests using the IDs of functions that are otherwise unpopulated. This allows a device to extend the number of outstanding requests. Such phantom functions nee...

Linux: netback processing of zero-length transmit fragment

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Transmit requests in Xen's virtual network protocol can consist of multiple parts. While not really useful, except for the initial part any of them may be of zero length, i.e. carry no data at all. Besides a certain initial portion of the to be transferred data, these parts are...

arm32: The cache may not be properly cleaned/invalidated (take two)

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Arm provides multiple helpers to clean & invalidate the cache for a given region. This is, for instance, used when allocating guest memory to ensure any writes such as the ones during scrubbing have reached memory before handing over the page to a guest. Unfortunately, the...

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...

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...

x86/AMD: Debug Mask handling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION AMD CPUs since 2014 have extensions to normal x86 debugging functionality. Xen supports guests using these extensions. Unfortunately there are errors in Xen's handling of the guest state, leading to denials of service. 1 CVE-2023-34327 - An HVM vCPU can end up operating in the...

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...

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...

x86/AMD: missing IOMMU TLB flushing

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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 poi...

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...

x86/AMD: Divide speculative information leak

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In the Zen1 microarchitecure, there is one divider in the pipeline which services uops from both threads. In the case of DE, the latched result from the previous DIV to execute will be forwarded speculatively. This is a covert channel that allows two threads to communicate witho...

top-level shadow reference dropped too early for 64-bit PV guests

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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...

arm32: The cache may not be properly cleaned/invalidated

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Arm provides multiple helpers to clean & invalidate the cache for a given region. This is, for instance, used when allocating guest memory to ensure any writes such as the ones during scrubbing have reached memory before handing over the page to a guest. Unfortunately, the...

Linux: buffer overrun in netback due to unusual packet

ISSUE DESCRIPTION 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...

x86/AMD: Speculative Return Stack Overflow

ISSUE DESCRIPTION Researchers from ETH Zurich have extended their prior research XSA-422, Branch Type Confusion, a.k.a Retbleed and have discovered INCEPTION, also know as RAS Return Address Stack Poisoning, and Speculative Return Stack Overflow. The RAS is updated when a CALL instruction is...

x86/Intel: Gather Data Sampling

ISSUE DESCRIPTION A researcher has discovered Gather Data Sampling, a transient execution side-channel whereby the AVX GATHER instructions can forward the content of stale vector registers to dependent instructions. The physical register file is a structure competitively shared between sibling...

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...