Xen Project

xen/arm: Boot modules are not scrubbed 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…

HVM soft-reset crashes toolstack libxl requires all data structures passed across its public interface to be initialized before use and disposed of afterwards by calling a specific set of functions. Many internal data structures also require this initialize / dispose discipline,…

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.9 through 4.14.x. On Arm, a guest is allowed to control whether memory accesses are bypassing the cache. This means that Xen needs to ensure that all writes (such as the ones during scrubbing) have reached the memory before handing over the page…

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. 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…

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There is a lack of preemption in evtchn_reset() / evtchn_destroy(). In particular, the FIFO event channel model allows guests to have a large number of event channels active at a time. Closing all of these (when resetting all event…

Memory leak in Xen 3.3 through 4.8.x allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (ARM or x86 AMD host OS memory consumption) by continually rebooting, because certain cleanup is skipped if no pass-through device was ever assigned, aka XSA-207.

Any guest can cause xenstored to crash by issuing a XS_RESET_WATCHES command within a transaction due to an assert() triggering. In case xenstored was built with NDEBUG #defined nothing bad will happen, as assert() is doing nothing in this case. Note that the default is not to…

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…

XAPI open file limit DoS It is possible for an unauthenticated client on the network to cause XAPI to hit its file-descriptor limit. This causes XAPI to be unable to accept new requests for other (trusted) clients, and blocks XAPI from carrying out any tasks that require the…

[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] To create and manage guests, domctl operations are used by the control domain, a possible Xenstore domain, or by a domain controlling a particular…

xen/arm: No memory limit for dom0less domUs The dom0less feature allows an administrator to create multiple unprivileged domains directly from Xen. Unfortunately, the memory limit from them is not set. This allow a domain to allocate memory beyond what an administrator…

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…

A side channel vulnerability on some of the AMD CPUs may allow an attacker to influence the return address prediction. This may result in speculative execution at an attacker-controlled address, potentially leading to information disclosure.

Insufficient cleanup of passed-through device IRQs The management of IRQs associated with physical devices exposed to x86 HVM guests involves an iterative operation in particular when cleaning up after the guest's use of the device. In the case where an interrupt is not…

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.

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

Arm: unbounded memory consumption for 2nd-level page tables Certain actions require e.g. 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…

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…

Mishandling of guest SSBD selection on AMD hardware The current logic to set SSBD on AMD Family 17h and Hygon Family 18h processors requires that the setting of SSBD is coordinated at a core level, as the setting is shared between threads. Logic was introduced to keep track of…

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…

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Neither xenstore implementation does any permission checks when reporting a xenstore watch event. A guest administrator can watch the root xenstored node, which will cause notifications for every created, modified, and deleted key.…

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…

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…