CVE-2018-12891 Information

Description

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.10.x. Certain PV MMU operations may take a long time to process. For that reason Xen explicitly checks for the need to preempt the current vCPU at certain points. A few rarely taken code paths did bypass such checks. By suitably enforcing the conditions through its own page table contents a malicious guest may cause such bypasses to be used for an unbounded number of iterations. A malicious or buggy PV guest may cause a Denial of Service (DoS) affecting the entire host. Specifically it may prevent use of a physical CPU for an indeterminate period of time. All Xen versions from 3.4 onwards are vulnerable. Xen versions 3.3 and earlier are vulnerable to an even wider class of attacks due to them lacking preemption checks altogether in the affected code paths. Only x86 systems are affected. ARM systems are not affected. Only multi-vCPU x86 PV guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 HVM or PVH guests as well as x86 single-vCPU PV ones cannot leverage the vulnerability.

CVSS Vector

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

Reference

http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/06/27/10 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/104570 http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041201 http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-264.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/11/msg00013.html https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201810-06 https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX235748 https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4236

Attack Complexity

LOW

Privileges Required

LOW

User Interaction Required

LOW

Scope

NONE

Confidentiality Impact

CHANGED

Integrity Impact

NONE

Availability Impact

NONE

Base Score

HIGH

Base Severity

6.5