VYPR
Medium severity4.7NVD Advisory· Published Jan 5, 2024· Updated Jun 17, 2026

CVE-2023-46836

CVE-2023-46836

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 enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active.

As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.

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Affected products

31

Patches

Vulnerability mechanics

References

2

News mentions

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