The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM
guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved
there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the
return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a
problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of
which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't
relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already
being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a
deadlock.
This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but
was analyse
In x86's APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) architecture,
error conditions are reported in a status register. Furthermore, the OS
can opt to receive an interrupt when a new error occurs.
It is possible to configure the error interrupt with an illegal vector,
which generates an error when an error interrupt is raised.
This case causes Xen to recurse through vlapic_error(). The recursion
itself is bounded; errors accumulate in the the status register and only
generate an interrupt when a new status bit becomes set.
However, the lock protecting this state in Xen will try to be taken
recursively, and deadlock.
When multiple devices share resources and one of them is to be passed
through to a guest, security of the entire system and of respective
guests individually cannot really be guaranteed without knowing
internals of any of the involved guests. Therefore such a configuration
cannot really be security-supported, yet making that explicit was so far
missing.
Resources the sharing of which is known to be problematic include, but
are not limited to
- - PCI Base Address Registers (BARs) of multiple devices mapping to the
same page (4k on x86),
- - INTx lines.
Certain PCI devices in a system might be assigned Reserved Memory
Regions (specified via Reserved Memory Region Reporting, "RMRR") for
Intel VT-d or Unity Mapping ranges for AMD-Vi. These are typically used
for platform tasks such as legacy USB emulation.
Since the precise purpose of these regions is unknown, once a device
associated with such a region is active, the mappings of these regions
need to remain continuouly accessible by the device. In the logic
establishing these mappings, error handling was flawed, resulting in
such mappings to potentially remain in place when they should have been
removed again. Respective guests would then
An optional feature of PCI MSI called "Multiple Message" allows a
device to use multiple consecutive interrupt vectors. Unlike for MSI-X,
the setting up of these consecutive vectors needs to happen all in one
go. In this handling an error path could be taken in different
situations, with or without a particular lock held. This error path
wrongly releases the lock even when it is not currently held.
Because of a logical error in XSA-407 (Branch Type Confusion), the
mitigation is not applied properly when it is intended to be used.
XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) uses the same
infrastructure, so is equally impacted.
For more details, see:
https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-407.html
https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-434.html
Unlike 32-bit PV guests, HVM guests may switch freely between 64-bit and
other modes. This in particular means that they may set registers used
to pass 32-bit-mode hypercall arguments to values outside of the range
32-bit code would be able to set them to.
When processing of hypercalls takes a considerable amount of time,
the hypervisor may choose to invoke a hypercall continuation. Doing so
involves putting (perhaps updated) hypercall arguments in respective
registers. For guests not running in 64-bit mode this further involves
a certain amount of translation of the values.
Unfortunately internal sanity checking of these translated valu
x86: shadow stack vs exceptions from emulation stubs
Recent x86 CPUs offer functionality named Control-flow Enforcement
Technology (CET). A sub-feature of this are Shadow Stacks (CET-SS).
CET-SS is a hardware feature designed to protect against Return Oriented
Programming attacks. When enabled, traditional stacks holding both data
and return addresses are accompanied by so called "shadow stacks",
holding little more than return addresses. Shadow stacks aren't
writable by normal instructions, and upon function returns their
contents are used to check for possible manipulation of a return address
coming from the traditional stack.
In particular certain memory accesses need intercepting by Xen.
VT-d: Failure to quarantine devices in !HVM builds
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.
pci: phantom functions assigned to incorrect contexts
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 need an IOMMU context setup, but failure to
setup the context is not fatal when the device is assigned. Not
failing device assignment when such failure happens can lead to the
primary device being assigned to a guest, while some of the phantom
functions are assigned to a different domain.
Speculative Race Condition impacts modern CPU architectures that support speculative execution, also known as GhostRace.
A Speculative Race Condition (SRC) vulnerability that impacts modern CPU architectures supporting speculative execution (related to Spectre V1) has been disclosed. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability to disclose arbitrary data from the CPU using race conditions to access the speculative executable code paths.
Information exposure through microarchitectural state after transient execution from some register files for some Intel(R) Atom(R) Processors may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.
arm32: The cache may not be properly cleaned/invalidated (take two)
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.
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
interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one
conditionally on whether XPTI was active.
As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations
are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race
condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections
and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.
x86/AMD: mismatch in IOMMU quarantine page table levels
The current setup of the quarantine page tables assumes that the
quarantine domain (dom_io) has been initialized with an address width
of DEFAULT_DOMAIN_ADDRESS_WIDTH (48) and hence 4 page table levels.
However dom_io being a PV domain gets the AMD-Vi IOMMU page tables
levels based on the maximum (hot pluggable) RAM address, and hence on
systems with no RAM above the 512GB mark only 3 page-table levels are
configured in the IOMMU.
On systems without RAM above the 512GB boundary
amd_iommu_quarantine_init() will setup page tables for the scratch
page with 4 levels, while the IOMMU will be configured to use 3 levels
only, resulting in the last
[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the
text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.]
AMD CPUs since ~2014 have extensions to normal x86 debugging functionality.
Xen supports guests using these extensions.
Unfortunately there are errors in Xen's handling of the guest state, leading
to denials of service.
1) CVE-2023-34327 - An HVM vCPU can end up operating in the context of
a previous vCPUs debug mask state.
2) CVE-2023-34328 - A PV vCPU can place a breakpoint over the live GDT.
This allows the PV vCPU to exploit XSA-156 / CVE-2015-8104 and lock
up the CPU entirely.
[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the
text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.]
AMD CPUs since ~2014 have extensions to normal x86 debugging functionality.
Xen supports guests using these extensions.
Unfortunately there are errors in Xen's handling of the guest state, leading
to denials of service.
1) CVE-2023-34327 - An HVM vCPU can end up operating in the context of
a previous vCPUs debug mask state.
2) CVE-2023-34328 - A PV vCPU can place a breakpoint over the live GDT.
This allows the PV vCPU to exploit XSA-156 / CVE-2015-8104 and lock
up the CPU entirely.
Multiple vulnerabilities in libfsimage disk handling
[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the
text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.]
libfsimage contains parsing code for several filesystems, most of them based on
grub-legacy code. libfsimage is used by pygrub to inspect guest disks.
Pygrub runs as the same user as the toolstack (root in a priviledged domain).
At least one issue has been reported to the Xen Security Team that allows an
attacker to trigger a stack buffer overflow in libfsimage. After further
analisys the Xen Security Team is no longer confident in the suitability of
libfsimage when run against guest controlled input with supe
The caching invalidation guidelines from the AMD-Vi specification (48882—Rev
3.07-PUB—Oct 2022) is incorrect on some hardware, as devices will malfunction
(see stale DMA mappings) if some fields of the DTE are updated but the IOMMU
TLB is not flushed.
Such stale DMA mappings can point to memory ranges not owned by the guest, thus
allowing access to unindented memory regions.
xenstored: A transaction conflict can crash C Xenstored
When a transaction is committed, C Xenstored will first check
the quota is correct before attempting to commit any nodes. It would
be possible that accounting is temporarily negative if a node has
been removed outside of the transaction.
Unfortunately, some versions of C Xenstored are assuming that the
quota cannot be negative and are using assert() to confirm it. This
will lead to C Xenstored crash when tools are built without -DNDEBUG
(this is the default).