An issue was discovered in Xen 4.11 allowing HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) or possibly gain host OS privileges because x86 IOREQ server resource accounting (for external emulators) was mishandled.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x on AMD x86 platforms, possibly allowing guest OS users to gain host OS privileges because TLB flushes do not always occur after IOMMU mapping changes.

issues with partially successful P2M updates on x86 T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] x86 HVM and PVH guests may be started in populate-on-demand (PoD) mode, to provide a way for them to later easily have more memory assigned. Guests are permitted to control certain P2M aspects of individual pages via hypercalls. These hypercalls may act on ranges of pages specified via page orders (resulting in a power-of-2 number of pages). In some cases the hypervisor carries out the requests by splitting them into smaller chunks. Error handling in certain PoD cases has been insufficient in that in particular partial success of some operations was not properly accounted for. There are two code paths affected - page removal (CVE-2021-28705) and insertion of new pages (CVE-2021-28709). (We provide one patch which combines the fix to both issues.)

x86 pv: Race condition in typeref acquisition Xen maintains a type reference count for pages, in addition to a regular reference count. This scheme is used to maintain invariants required for Xen's safety, e.g. PV guests may not have direct writeable access to pagetables; updates need auditing by Xen. Unfortunately, the logic for acquiring a type reference has a race condition, whereby a safely TLB flush is issued too early and creates a window where the guest can re-establish the read/write mapping before writeability is prohibited.

qemu-dm.debug in Xen 3.2.1 allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on the /tmp/args temporary file.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x allowing x86 guest OS users to cause a host OS denial of service, achieve data corruption, or possibly gain privileges by exploiting a race condition that leads to a use-after-free involving 2MiB and 1GiB superpages.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x allowing x86 guest OS users to cause a denial of service (data corruption), cause a data leak, or possibly gain privileges because an AMD IOMMU page-table entry can be half-updated.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x allowing x86 HVM and PVH guest OS users to cause a denial of service (data corruption), cause a data leak, or possibly gain privileges because coalescing of per-page IOMMU TLB flushes is mishandled.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.9.x allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) or gain host OS privileges by leveraging incorrect error handling for reference counting in shadow mode.

Xen 4.0.x and 4.1.x incorrectly releases a grant reference when releasing a non-v1, non-transitive grant, which allows local guest administrators to cause a denial of service (host crash), obtain sensitive information, or possibly have other impacts via unspecified vectors.

The Elf parser (libelf) in Xen 4.2.x and earlier allow local guest administrators with certain permissions to have an unspecified impact via a crafted kernel, related to "pointer dereferences" involving unexpected calculations.

The XENMEM_exchange handler in Xen 4.2 and earlier does not properly check the memory address, which allows local PV guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly gain privileges via unspecified vectors that overwrite memory in the hypervisor reserved range.

Race condition in the grant table code in Xen 4.6.x through 4.9.x allows local guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (free list corruption and host crash) or gain privileges on the host via vectors involving maptrack free list handling.

(1) TMEMC_SAVE_GET_CLIENT_WEIGHT, (2) TMEMC_SAVE_GET_CLIENT_CAP, (3) TMEMC_SAVE_GET_CLIENT_FLAGS and (4) TMEMC_SAVE_END 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 (NULL pointer dereference or memory corruption and host crash) or possibly have other unspecified impacts via a NULL client id.

An issue was discovered in xenoprof in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users (with active profiling) to obtain sensitive information about other guests, cause a denial of service, or possibly gain privileges. For guests for which "active" profiling was enabled by the administrator, the xenoprof code uses the standard Xen shared ring structure. Unfortunately, this code did not treat the guest as a potential adversary: it trusts the guest not to modify buffer size information or modify head / tail pointers in unexpected ways. This can crash the host (DoS). Privilege escalation cannot be ruled out.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.9.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to execute arbitrary code on the host OS because of a race condition that can cause a stale TLB entry.

PoD operations on misaligned GFNs T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] x86 HVM and PVH guests may be started in populate-on-demand (PoD) mode, to provide a way for them to later easily have more memory assigned. Guests are permitted to control certain P2M aspects of individual pages via hypercalls. These hypercalls may act on ranges of pages specified via page orders (resulting in a power-of-2 number of pages). The implementation of some of these hypercalls for PoD does not enforce the base page frame number to be suitably aligned for the specified order, yet some code involved in PoD handling actually makes such an assumption. These operations are XENMEM_decrease_reservation (CVE-2021-28704) and XENMEM_populate_physmap (CVE-2021-28707), the latter usable only by domains controlling the guest, i.e. a de-privileged qemu or a stub domain. (Patch 1, combining the fix to both these two issues.) In addition handling of XENMEM_decrease_reservation can also trigger a host crash when the specified page order is neither 4k nor 2M nor 1G (CVE-2021-28708, patch 2).

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service or possibly gain privileges because of missing memory barriers in read-write unlock paths. The read-write unlock paths don't contain a memory barrier. On Arm, this means a processor is allowed to re-order the memory access with the preceding ones. In other words, the unlock may be seen by another processor before all the memory accesses within the "critical" section. As a consequence, it may be possible to have a writer executing a critical section at the same time as readers or another writer. In other words, many of the assumptions (e.g., a variable cannot be modified after a check) in the critical sections are not safe anymore. The read-write locks are used in hypercalls (such as grant-table ones), so a malicious guest could exploit the race. For instance, there is a small window where Xen can leak memory if XENMAPSPACE_grant_table is used concurrently. A malicious guest may be able to leak memory, or cause a hypervisor crash resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS). Information leak and privilege escalation cannot be excluded.

Multiple integer overflows in the Elf parser (libelf) in Xen 4.2.x and earlier allow local guest administrators with certain permissions to have an unspecified impact via a crafted kernel.

Multiple unspecified vulnerabilities in the Elf parser (libelf) in Xen 4.2.x and earlier allow local guest administrators with certain permissions to have an unspecified impact via a crafted kernel, related to "other problems" that are not CVE-2013-2194 or CVE-2013-2195.

The do_tmem_destroy_pool function in the Transcendent Memory (TMEM) in Xen 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 does not properly validate pool ids, which allows local guest OS users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and host crash) or execute arbitrary code 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 4.11.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service or gain privileges by leveraging a page-writability race condition during addition of a passed-through PCI device.

The GNTTABOP_swap_grant_ref sub-operation in the grant table hypercall in Xen 4.2 and Citrix XenServer 6.0.2 allows local guest kernels or administrators to cause a denial of service (host crash) and possibly gain privileges via a crafted grant reference that triggers a write to an arbitrary hypervisor memory location.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.9.x allowing PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) or gain host OS privileges in shadow mode by mapping a certain auxiliary page.

PoD operations on misaligned GFNs T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] x86 HVM and PVH guests may be started in populate-on-demand (PoD) mode, to provide a way for them to later easily have more memory assigned. Guests are permitted to control certain P2M aspects of individual pages via hypercalls. These hypercalls may act on ranges of pages specified via page orders (resulting in a power-of-2 number of pages). The implementation of some of these hypercalls for PoD does not enforce the base page frame number to be suitably aligned for the specified order, yet some code involved in PoD handling actually makes such an assumption. These operations are XENMEM_decrease_reservation (CVE-2021-28704) and XENMEM_populate_physmap (CVE-2021-28707), the latter usable only by domains controlling the guest, i.e. a de-privileged qemu or a stub domain. (Patch 1, combining the fix to both these two issues.) In addition handling of XENMEM_decrease_reservation can also trigger a host crash when the specified page order is neither 4k nor 2M nor 1G (CVE-2021-28708, patch 2).

PoD operations on misaligned GFNs T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] x86 HVM and PVH guests may be started in populate-on-demand (PoD) mode, to provide a way for them to later easily have more memory assigned. Guests are permitted to control certain P2M aspects of individual pages via hypercalls. These hypercalls may act on ranges of pages specified via page orders (resulting in a power-of-2 number of pages). The implementation of some of these hypercalls for PoD does not enforce the base page frame number to be suitably aligned for the specified order, yet some code involved in PoD handling actually makes such an assumption. These operations are XENMEM_decrease_reservation (CVE-2021-28704) and XENMEM_populate_physmap (CVE-2021-28707), the latter usable only by domains controlling the guest, i.e. a de-privileged qemu or a stub domain. (Patch 1, combining the fix to both these two issues.) In addition handling of XENMEM_decrease_reservation can also trigger a host crash when the specified page order is neither 4k nor 2M nor 1G (CVE-2021-28708, patch 2).

certain VT-d IOMMUs may not work in shared page table mode For efficiency reasons, address translation control structures (page tables) may (and, on suitable hardware, by default will) be shared between CPUs, for second-level translation (EPT), and IOMMUs. These page tables are presently set up to always be 4 levels deep. However, an IOMMU may require the use of just 3 page table levels. In such a configuration the lop level table needs to be stripped before inserting the root table's address into the hardware pagetable base register. When sharing page tables, Xen erroneously skipped this stripping. Consequently, the guest is able to write to leaf page table entries.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing attackers to gain host OS privileges via DMA in a situation where an untrusted domain has access to a physical device. This occurs because passed through PCI devices may corrupt host memory after deassignment. When a PCI device is assigned to an untrusted domain, it is possible for that domain to program the device to DMA to an arbitrary address. The IOMMU is used to protect the host from malicious DMA by making sure that the device addresses can only target memory assigned to the guest. However, when the guest domain is torn down, or the device is deassigned, the device is assigned back to dom0, thus allowing any in-flight DMA to potentially target critical host data. An untrusted domain with access to a physical device can DMA into host memory, leading to privilege escalation. Only systems where guests are given direct access to physical devices capable of DMA (PCI pass-through) are vulnerable. Systems which do not use PCI pass-through are not vulnerable.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x on AMD x86 platforms, possibly allowing guest OS users to gain host OS privileges because small IOMMU mappings are unsafely combined into larger ones.

issues with partially successful P2M updates on x86 T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] x86 HVM and PVH guests may be started in populate-on-demand (PoD) mode, to provide a way for them to later easily have more memory assigned. Guests are permitted to control certain P2M aspects of individual pages via hypercalls. These hypercalls may act on ranges of pages specified via page orders (resulting in a power-of-2 number of pages). In some cases the hypervisor carries out the requests by splitting them into smaller chunks. Error handling in certain PoD cases has been insufficient in that in particular partial success of some operations was not properly accounted for. There are two code paths affected - page removal (CVE-2021-28705) and insertion of new pages (CVE-2021-28709). (We provide one patch which combines the fix to both issues.)

grant table v2 status pages may remain accessible after de-allocation (take two) Guest get permitted access to certain Xen-owned pages of memory. The majority of such pages remain allocated / associated with a guest for its entire lifetime. Grant table v2 status pages, however, get de-allocated when a guest switched (back) from v2 to v1. The freeing of such pages requires that the hypervisor know where in the guest these pages were mapped. The hypervisor tracks only one use within guest space, but racing requests from the guest to insert mappings of these pages may result in any of them to become mapped in multiple locations. Upon switching back from v2 to v1, the guest would then retain access to a page that was freed and perhaps re-used for other purposes. This bug was fortuitously fixed by code cleanup in Xen 4.14, and backported to security-supported Xen branches as a prerequisite of the fix for XSA-378.

The PV superpage functionality in arch/x86/mm.c in Xen 3.4.0, 3.4.1, and 4.1.x through 4.6.x allows local PV guests to obtain sensitive information, cause a denial of service, gain privileges, or have unspecified other impact via a crafted page identifier (MFN) to the (1) MMUEXT_MARK_SUPER or (2) MMUEXT_UNMARK_SUPER sub-op in the HYPERVISOR_mmuext_op hypercall or (3) unknown vectors related to page table updates.

Heap-based buffer overflow in the IDE subsystem in QEMU, as used in Xen 4.5.x and earlier, when the container has a CDROM drive enabled, allows local guest users to execute arbitrary code on the host via unspecified ATAPI commands.

Buffer overflow in Xen 4.4.x allows local users to read system memory or cause a denial of service (crash) via a crafted 32-bit guest kernel, related to searching for an appended DTB.

Xen 3.3 through 4.1, when XSM is enabled, allows local users to cause a denial of service via vectors related to a "large memory allocation," a different vulnerability than CVE-2014-1891, CVE-2014-1893, and CVE-2014-1894.

An attacker with local access to a system (either through a disk or external drive) can present a modified XFS partition to grub-legacy in such a way to exploit a memory corruption in grub’s XFS file system implementation.

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 arithmetics in the helpers can overflow and would then result to skip the cache cleaning/invalidation. Therefore there is no guarantee when all the writes will reach the memory. This undefined behavior was meant to be addressed by XSA-437, but the approach was not sufficient.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There are evtchn_reset() race conditions. Uses of EVTCHNOP_reset (potentially by a guest on itself) or XEN_DOMCTL_soft_reset (by itself covered by XSA-77) can lead to the violation of various internal assumptions. This may lead to out of bounds memory accesses or triggering of bug checks. In particular, x86 PV guests may be able to elevate their privilege to that of the host. Host and guest crashes are also possible, leading to a Denial of Service (DoS). Information leaks cannot be ruled out. All Xen versions from 4.5 onwards are vulnerable. Xen versions 4.4 and earlier are not vulnerable.

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 4.13.x, allowing x86 HVM guest OS users to cause a hypervisor crash. An inverted conditional in x86 HVM guests' dirty video RAM tracking code allows such guests to make Xen de-reference a pointer guaranteed to point at unmapped space. A malicious or buggy HVM guest may cause the hypervisor to crash, resulting in Denial of Service (DoS) affecting the entire host. Xen versions from 4.8 onwards are affected. Xen versions 4.7 and earlier are not affected. Only x86 systems are affected. Arm systems are not affected. Only x86 HVM guests using shadow paging can leverage the vulnerability. In addition, there needs to be an entity actively monitoring a guest's video frame buffer (typically for display purposes) in order for such a guest to be able to leverage the vulnerability. x86 PV guests, as well as x86 HVM guests using hardware assisted paging (HAP), cannot leverage the vulnerability.

Heap-based buffer overflow in the flask_security_label function in Xen 3.3, when compiled with the XSM:FLASK module, allows unprivileged domain users (domU) to execute arbitrary code via the flask_op hypercall.

The ocaml binding for the xc_vcpu_getaffinity function in Xen 4.2.x and 4.3.x frees certain memory that may still be intended for use, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (heap corruption and crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via unspecified vectors that trigger a (1) use-after-free or (2) double free.

The XEN_DOMCTL_getmemlist hypercall in Xen 3.4.x through 4.3.x (possibly 4.3.1) does not always obtain the page_alloc_lock and mm_rwlock in the same order, which allows local guest administrators to cause a denial of service (host deadlock).

Certain page table manipulation operations in Xen 4.1.x, 4.2.x, and earlier are not preemptible, which allows local PV kernels to cause a denial of service via vectors related to "deep page table traversal."

The vmx_set_uc_mode function in Xen 3.3 through 4.3, when disabling caches, allows local HVM guests with access to memory mapped I/O regions to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption and possibly hypervisor or guest kernel panic) via a crafted GFN range.

Buffer overflow in the Python bindings for the xc_vcpu_setaffinity call in Xen 4.0.x, 4.1.x, and 4.2.x allows local administrators with permissions to configure VCPU affinity to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and xend toolstack crash) and possibly gain privileges via a crafted cpumap.

Xen 4.4.x, when running on an ARM system and "handling an unknown system register access from 64-bit userspace," returns to an instruction of the trap handler for kernel space faults instead of an instruction that is associated with faults in 64-bit userspace, which allows local guest users to cause a denial of service (crash) and possibly gain privileges via a crafted process.

The pciback_enable_msi function in the PCI backend driver (drivers/xen/pciback/conf_space_capability_msi.c) in Xen for the Linux kernel 2.6.18 and 3.8 allows guest OS users with PCI device access to cause a denial of service via a large number of kernel log messages. NOTE: some of these details are obtained from third party information.

Stack-based buffer overflow in the dirty video RAM tracking functionality in Xen 3.4 through 4.1 allows local HVM guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (crash) via a large bitmap image.