An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x. The DEBUGCTL MSR contains several debugging features, some of which virtualise cleanly, but some do not. In particular, Branch Trace Store is not virtualised by the processor, and software has to be careful to configure it suitably not to lock up the core. As a result, it must only be available to fully trusted guests. Unfortunately, in the case that vPMU is disabled, all value checking was skipped, allowing the guest to choose any MSR_DEBUGCTL setting it likes. A malicious or buggy guest administrator (on Intel x86 HVM or PVH) can lock up the entire host, causing a Denial of Service.

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 through 4.11.x. The logic in oxenstored for handling writes depended on the order of evaluation of expressions making up a tuple. As indicated in section 7.7.3 "Operations on data structures" of the OCaml manual, the order of evaluation of subexpressions is not specified. In practice, different implementations behave differently. Thus, oxenstored may not enforce the configured quota-maxentity. This allows a malicious or buggy guest to write as many xenstore entries as it wishes, causing unbounded memory usage in oxenstored. This can lead to a system-wide DoS.

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 channels or when cleaning up after the guest) may take extended periods of time. So far, there was no arrangement for preemption at suitable intervals, allowing a CPU to spend an almost unbounded amount of time in the processing of these operations. Malicious or buggy guest kernels can mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack affecting the entire system. All Xen versions are vulnerable in principle. Whether versions 4.3 and older are vulnerable depends on underlying hardware characteristics.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.10.x allowing x86 HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS infinite loop) in situations where a QEMU device model attempts to make invalid transitions between states of a request.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Some OSes (such as Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD) are processing watch events using a single thread. If the events are received faster than the thread is able to handle, they will get queued. As the queue is unbounded, a guest may be able to trigger an OOM in the backend. All systems with a FreeBSD, Linux, or NetBSD (any version) dom0 are vulnerable.

Multiple integer overflows in the (1) tmh_copy_from_client and (2) tmh_copy_to_client functions in the Transcendent Memory (TMEM) in Xen 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 allow local guest OS users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and host crash) via unspecified vectors. NOTE: this issue was originally published as part of CVE-2012-3497, which was too general; CVE-2012-3497 has been SPLIT into this ID and others.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing Arm guest OS users to cause a hypervisor crash because of a missing alignment check in VCPUOP_register_vcpu_info. The hypercall VCPUOP_register_vcpu_info is used by a guest to register a shared region with the hypervisor. The region will be mapped into Xen address space so it can be directly accessed. On Arm, the region is accessed with instructions that require a specific alignment. Unfortunately, there is no check that the address provided by the guest will be correctly aligned. As a result, a malicious guest could cause a hypervisor crash by passing a misaligned address. A malicious guest administrator may cause a hypervisor crash, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS). All Xen versions are vulnerable. Only Arm systems are vulnerable. x86 systems are not affected.

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 rescheduled. If the device model were to signal Xen without having actually completed the operation, the de-schedule / re-schedule cycle would repeat. If, in addition, Xen is resignalled very quickly, the re-schedule may occur before the de-schedule was fully complete, triggering a shortcut. This potentially repeating process uses ordinary recursive function calls, and thus could result in a stack overflow. A malicious or buggy stubdomain serving a HVM guest can cause Xen to crash, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) to the entire host. Only x86 systems are affected. Arm systems are not affected. Only x86 stubdomains serving HVM guests can exploit the vulnerability.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. A bounds check common to most operation time functions specific to FIFO event channels depends on the CPU observing consistent state. While the producer side uses appropriately ordered writes, the consumer side isn't protected against re-ordered reads, and may hence end up de-referencing a NULL pointer. Malicious or buggy guest kernels can mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack affecting the entire system. Only Arm systems may be vulnerable. Whether a system is vulnerable depends on the specific CPU. x86 systems are not vulnerable.

The hypercall_create_continuation function in arch/arm/domain.c in Xen 4.4.x through 4.6.x allows local guest users to cause a denial of service (host crash) via a preemptible hypercall to the multicall interface.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.9.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service (memory leak) because reference counts are mishandled.

QEMU, as used in Xen 3.3.x through 4.5.x, does not properly restrict access to PCI command registers, which might allow local HVM guest users to cause a denial of service (non-maskable interrupt and host crash) by disabling the (1) memory or (2) I/O decoding for a PCI Express device and then accessing the device, which triggers an Unsupported Request (UR) response.

The XEN_DOMCTL_memory_mapping hypercall in Xen 3.2.x through 4.5.x, when using a PCI passthrough device, is not preemptible, which allows local x86 HVM domain users to cause a denial of service (host CPU consumption) via a crafted request to the device model (qemu-dm).

Xen 3.3.x through 4.5.x and the Linux kernel through 3.19.1 do not properly restrict access to PCI command registers, which might allow local guest OS users to cause a denial of service (non-maskable interrupt and host crash) by disabling the (1) memory or (2) I/O decoding for a PCI Express device and then accessing the device, which triggers an Unsupported Request (UR) response.

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.12.3 through 4.12.4 and 4.13.1 through 4.14.x. An x86 HVM guest with PCI pass through devices can force the allocation of all IDT vectors on the system by rebooting itself with MSI or MSI-X capabilities enabled and entries setup. Such reboots will leak any vectors used by the MSI(-X) entries that the guest might had enabled, and hence will lead to vector exhaustion on the system, not allowing further PCI pass through devices to work properly. HVM guests with PCI pass through devices can mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack affecting the pass through of PCI devices to other guests or the hardware domain. In the latter case, this would affect the entire host.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Nodes in xenstore have an ownership. In oxenstored, a owner could give a node away. However, node ownership has quota implications. Any guest can run another guest out of quota, or create an unbounded number of nodes owned by dom0, thus running xenstored out of memory A malicious guest administrator can cause a denial of service against a specific guest or against the whole host. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Xenstored and guests communicate via a shared memory page using a specific protocol. When a guest violates this protocol, xenstored will drop the connection to that guest. Unfortunately, this is done by just removing the guest from xenstored's internal management, resulting in the same actions as if the guest had been destroyed, including sending an @releaseDomain event. @releaseDomain events do not say that the guest has been removed. All watchers of this event must look at the states of all guests to find the guest that has been removed. When an @releaseDomain is generated due to a domain xenstored protocol violation, because the guest is still running, the watchers will not react. Later, when the guest is actually destroyed, xenstored will no longer have it stored in its internal data base, so no further @releaseDomain event will be sent. This can lead to a zombie domain; memory mappings of that guest's memory will not be removed, due to the missing event. This zombie domain will be cleaned up only after another domain is destroyed, as that will trigger another @releaseDomain event. If the device model of the guest that violated the Xenstore protocol is running in a stub-domain, a use-after-free case could happen in xenstored, after having removed the guest from its internal data base, possibly resulting in a crash of xenstored. A malicious guest can block resources of the host for a period after its own death. Guests with a stub domain device model can eventually crash xenstored, resulting in a more serious denial of service (the prevention of any further domain management operations). Only the C variant of Xenstore is affected; the Ocaml variant is not affected. Only HVM guests with a stubdom device model can cause a serious DoS.

Xen 4.5.x through 4.7.x on AMD systems without the NRip feature, when emulating instructions that generate software interrupts, allows local HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service (guest crash) by leveraging an incorrect choice for software interrupt delivery.

The PV pagetable code in arch/x86/mm.c in Xen 4.7.x and earlier allows local 32-bit PV guest OS administrators to gain host OS privileges by leveraging fast-paths for updating pagetable entries.

The libxl device-handling in Xen through 4.6.x allows local guest OS users with access to the driver domain to cause a denial of service (management tool confusion) by manipulating information in the backend directories in xenstore.

The xrstor function in arch/x86/xstate.c in Xen 4.x does not properly handle writes to the hardware FSW.ES bit when running on AMD64 processors, which allows local guest OS users to obtain sensitive register content information from another guest by leveraging pending exception and mask bits. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incorrect fix for CVE-2013-2076.

x86: unintended memory sharing between guests On Intel systems that support the "virtualize APIC accesses" feature, a guest can read and write the global shared xAPIC page by moving the local APIC out of xAPIC mode. Access to this shared page bypasses the expected isolation that should exist between two guests.

The fpu_fxrstor function in arch/x86/i387.c in Xen 4.x does not properly handle writes to the hardware FSW.ES bit when running on AMD64 processors, which allows local guest OS users to obtain sensitive register content information from another guest by leveraging pending exception and mask bits. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incorrect fix for CVE-2013-2076.

Xen, when used on a system providing PV backends, allows local guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) or gain privileges by writing to memory shared between the frontend and backend, aka a double fetch vulnerability.

The x86_decode_insn function in arch/x86/kvm/emulate.c in the Linux kernel before 4.8.7, when KVM is enabled, allows local users to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) via a certain use of a ModR/M byte in an undefined instruction.

Unspecified vulnerability in Oracle Sun Solaris 11.3 allows local users to affect availability via vectors related to Kernel Zones.

The filesystem layer in the Linux kernel before 4.5.5 proceeds with post-rename operations after an OverlayFS file is renamed to a self-hardlink, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) via a rename system call, related to fs/namei.c and fs/open.c.

The Linux kernel component in IBM PowerKVM 2.1 before 2.1.1.3-65.10 and 3.1 before 3.1.0.2 allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS infinite loop and hang) via unspecified vectors.

The tm_reclaim_thread function in arch/powerpc/kernel/process.c in the Linux kernel before 4.4.1 on powerpc platforms does not ensure that TM suspend mode exists before proceeding with a tm_reclaim call, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (TM Bad Thing exception and panic) via a crafted application.

NVIDIA vGPU software contains a vulnerability in the Virtual GPU Manager (nvidia.ko), where a user in the guest OS can cause a GPU interrupt storm on the hypervisor host, leading to a denial of service.

The TCP stack in the Linux kernel before 4.8.10 mishandles skb truncation, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) via a crafted application that makes sendto system calls, related to net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c and net/ipv6/tcp_ipv6.c.