XEN : Security Vulnerabilities CVSS score between 5 and 5.99

An issue in “Zen 2” CPUs, under specific microarchitectural circumstances, may allow an attacker to potentially access sensitive information.

A division-by-zero error on some AMD processors can potentially return speculative data resulting in loss of confidentiality. 

x86: speculative vulnerability in 32bit SYSCALL path 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.

Xenstore: Guests can create arbitrary number of nodes via transactions T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] In case a node has been created in a transaction and it is later deleted in the same transaction, the transaction will be terminated with an error. As this error is encountered only when handling the deleted node at transaction finalization, the transaction will have been performed partially and without updating the accounting information. This will enable a malicious guest to create arbitrary number of nodes.

Xenstore: Guests can create arbitrary number of nodes via transactions T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] In case a node has been created in a transaction and it is later deleted in the same transaction, the transaction will be terminated with an error. As this error is encountered only when handling the deleted node at transaction finalization, the transaction will have been performed partially and without updating the accounting information. This will enable a malicious guest to create arbitrary number of nodes.

Oxenstored 32->31 bit integer truncation issues Integers in Ocaml are 63 or 31 bits of signed precision. The Ocaml Xenbus library takes a C uint32_t out of the ring and casts it directly to an Ocaml integer. In 64-bit Ocaml builds this is fine, but in 32-bit builds, it truncates off the most significant bit, and then creates unsigned/signed confusion in the remainder. This in turn can feed a negative value into logic not expecting a negative value, resulting in unexpected exceptions being thrown. The unexpected exception is not handled suitably, creating a busy-loop trying (and failing) to take the bad packet out of the xenstore ring.

Xenstore: Cooperating guests can create arbitrary numbers of nodes T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Since the fix of XSA-322 any Xenstore node owned by a removed domain will be modified to be owned by Dom0. This will allow two malicious guests working together to create an arbitrary number of Xenstore nodes. This is possible by domain A letting domain B write into domain A's local Xenstore tree. Domain B can then create many nodes and reboot. The nodes created by domain B will now be owned by Dom0. By repeating this process over and over again an arbitrary number of nodes can be created, as Dom0's number of nodes isn't limited by Xenstore quota.

Xenstore: Cooperating guests can create arbitrary numbers of nodes T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Since the fix of XSA-322 any Xenstore node owned by a removed domain will be modified to be owned by Dom0. This will allow two malicious guests working together to create an arbitrary number of Xenstore nodes. This is possible by domain A letting domain B write into domain A's local Xenstore tree. Domain B can then create many nodes and reboot. The nodes created by domain B will now be owned by Dom0. By repeating this process over and over again an arbitrary number of nodes can be created, as Dom0's number of nodes isn't limited by Xenstore quota.

Xenstore: Guests can create orphaned Xenstore nodes By creating multiple nodes inside a transaction resulting in an error, a malicious guest can create orphaned nodes in the Xenstore data base, as the cleanup after the error will not remove all nodes already created. When the transaction is committed after this situation, nodes without a valid parent can be made permanent in the data base.

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 opening of file descriptors.

lock order inversion in transitive grant copy handling 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, but in respectively opposite order. With suitable timing between the involved grant copy operations this may result in the locking up of a CPU.

Racy interactions between dirty vram tracking and paging log dirty hypercalls Activation of log dirty mode done by XEN_DMOP_track_dirty_vram (was named HVMOP_track_dirty_vram before Xen 4.9) is racy with ongoing log dirty hypercalls. A suitably timed call to XEN_DMOP_track_dirty_vram can enable log dirty while another CPU is still in the process of tearing down the structures related to a previously enabled log dirty mode (XEN_DOMCTL_SHADOW_OP_OFF). This is due to lack of mutually exclusive locking between both operations and can lead to entries being added in already freed slots, resulting in a memory leak.

Certain Arm Cortex and Neoverse processors through 2022-03-08 do not properly restrict cache speculation, aka Spectre-BHB. An attacker can leverage the shared branch history in the Branch History Buffer (BHB) to influence mispredicted branches. Then, cache allocation can allow the attacker to obtain sensitive information.

IBPB may not prevent return branch predictions from being specified by pre-IBPB branch targets leading to a potential information disclosure.

A PV guest could DoS Xen while unmapping a grant To address XSA-380, reference counting was introduced for grant mappings for the case where a PV guest would have the IOMMU enabled. PV guests can request two forms of mappings. When both are in use for any individual mapping, unmapping of such a mapping can be requested in two steps. The reference count for such a mapping would then mistakenly be decremented twice. Underflow of the counters gets detected, resulting in the triggering of a hypervisor bug check.

Incomplete cleanup in specific special register write operations for some Intel(R) Processors may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.

Incomplete cleanup in specific special register read operations for some Intel(R) Processors may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.

Incomplete cleanup of microarchitectural fill buffers on some Intel(R) Processors may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.

Incomplete cleanup of multi-core shared buffers for some Intel(R) Processors may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.

inadequate grant-v2 status frames array bounds check 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 guests on x86, translation of requests has to occur because the interface structure layouts commonly differ between 32- and 64-bit. The translation of the request to obtain the frame numbers of the grant status table involves translating the resulting array of frame numbers. Since the space used to carry out the translation is limited, the translation layer tells the core function the capacity of the array within translation space. Unfortunately the core function then only enforces array bounds to be below 8 times the specified value, and would write past the available space if enough frame numbers needed storing.

long running loops in grant table handling In order to properly monitor resource use, Xen maintains information on the grant mappings a domain may create to map grants offered by other domains. In the process of carrying out certain actions, Xen would iterate over all such entries, including ones which aren't in use anymore and some which may have been created but never used. If the number of entries for a given domain is large enough, this iterating of the entire table may tie up a CPU for too long, starving other domains or causing issues in the hypervisor itself. Note that a domain may map its own grants, i.e. there is no need for multiple domains to be involved here. A pair of "cooperating" guests may, however, cause the effects to be more severe.

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 page over to the allocator. Unfortunately, it was discovered that modules will not be scrubbed on Arm.

x86: Speculative vulnerabilities with bare (non-shim) 32-bit PV guests 32-bit x86 PV guest kernels run in ring 1. At the time when Xen was developed, this area of the i386 architecture was rarely used, which is why Xen was able to use it to implement paravirtualisation, Xen's novel approach to virtualization. In AMD64, Xen had to use a different implementation approach, so Xen does not use ring 1 to support 64-bit guests. With the focus now being on 64-bit systems, and the availability of explicit hardware support for virtualization, fixing speculation issues in ring 1 is not a priority for processor companies. Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) is an architectural x86 extension put together to combat speculative execution sidechannel attacks, including Spectre v2. It was retrofitted in microcode to existing CPUs. For more details on Spectre v2, see: http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-254.html However, IBRS does not architecturally protect ring 0 from predictions learnt in ring 1. For more details, see: https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/deep-dives/deep-dive-indirect-branch-restricted-speculation Similar situations may exist with other mitigations for other kinds of speculative execution attacks. The situation is quite likely to be similar for speculative execution attacks which have yet to be discovered, disclosed, or mitigated.

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, but not all of them. When the "soft reset" feature was implemented, the libxl__domain_suspend_state structure didn't require any initialization or disposal. At some point later, an initialization function was introduced for the structure; but the "soft reset" path wasn't refactored to call the initialization function. When a guest nwo initiates a "soft reboot", uninitialized data structure leads to an assert() when later code finds the structure in an unexpected state. The effect of this is to crash the process monitoring the guest. How this affects the system depends on the structure of the toolstack. For xl, this will have no security-relevant effect: every VM has its own independent monitoring process, which contains no state. The domain in question will hang in a crashed state, but can be destroyed by `xl destroy` just like any other non-cooperating domain. For daemon-based toolstacks linked against libxl, such as libvirt, this will crash the toolstack, losing the state of any in-progress operations (localized DoS), and preventing further administrator operations unless the daemon is configured to restart automatically (system-wide DoS). If crashes "leak" resources, then repeated crashes could use up resources, also causing a system-wide DoS.

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 to a guest. Unfortunately, the operation to clean the cache is happening before checking if the page was scrubbed. Therefore there is no guarantee when all the writes will reach the memory.