CVE-2019-19578

Summary

CVECVE-2019-19578
StatePUBLIC
Assigner[email protected]
Source PriorityCVE Program / NVD first with legacy fallback
Published2019-12-11 18:16:00 UTC
Updated2023-11-07 03:07:00 UTC
DescriptionAn issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service via degenerate chains of linear pagetables, because of an incorrect fix for CVE-2017-15595. "Linear pagetables" is a technique which involves either pointing a pagetable at itself, or to another pagetable of the same or higher level. Xen has limited support for linear pagetables: A page may either point to itself, or point to another pagetable of the same level (i.e., L2 to L2, L3 to L3, and so on). XSA-240 introduced an additional restriction that limited the "depth" of such chains by allowing pages to either *point to* other pages of the same level, or *be pointed to* by other pages of the same level, but not both. To implement this, we keep track of the number of outstanding times a page points to or is pointed to another page table, to prevent both from happening at the same time. Unfortunately, the original commit introducing this reset this count when resuming validation of a partially-validated pagetable, incorrectly dropping some "linear_pt_entry" counts. If an attacker could engineer such a situation to occur, they might be able to make loops or other arbitrary chains of linear pagetables, as described in XSA-240. A malicious or buggy PV guest may cause the hypervisor to crash, resulting in Denial of Service (DoS) affecting the entire host. Privilege escalation and information leaks cannot be excluded. All versions of Xen are vulnerable. Only x86 systems are affected. Arm systems are not affected. Only x86 PV guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 HVM and PVH guests cannot leverage the vulnerability. Only systems which have enabled linear pagetables are vulnerable. Systems which have disabled linear pagetables, either by selecting CONFIG_PV_LINEAR_PT=n when building the hypervisor, or adding pv-linear-pt=false on the command-line, are not vulnerable.

Risk And Classification

Problem Types: CWE-682

NVD Known Affected Configurations (CPE 2.3)

TypeVendorProductVersionUpdateEditionLanguage
Operating System Fedoraproject Fedora 31 All All All
Operating System Fedoraproject Fedora 31 All All All
Operating System Xen Xen All All All All

References

ReferenceSourceLinkTags
Debian -- Security Information -- DSA-4602-1 xen DEBIAN www.debian.org
Xen: Multiple vulnerabilities (GLSA 202003-56) — Gentoo security GENTOO security.gentoo.org
XSA-309 - Xen Security Advisories MISC xenbits.xen.org Patch, Vendor Advisory
[SECURITY] Fedora 31 Update: xen-4.12.1-8.fc31 - package-announce - Fedora Mailing-Lists FEDORA lists.fedoraproject.org Third Party Advisory
[SECURITY] Fedora 30 Update: xen-4.11.3-2.fc30 - package-announce - Fedora Mailing-Lists FEDORA lists.fedoraproject.org
[SECURITY] Fedora 31 Update: xen-4.12.1-8.fc31 - package-announce - Fedora Mailing-Lists lists.fedoraproject.org
[security-announce] openSUSE-SU-2020:0011-1: important: Security update SUSE lists.opensuse.org
Bugtraq: [SECURITY] [DSA 4602-1] xen security update BUGTRAQ seclists.org
[SECURITY] Fedora 30 Update: xen-4.11.3-2.fc30 - package-announce - Fedora Mailing-Lists lists.fedoraproject.org
CVE Program record CVE.ORG www.cve.org canonical
NVD vulnerability detail NVD nvd.nist.gov canonical, analysis

Legacy QID Mappings

  • 500754 Alpine Linux Security Update for xen
  • 504531 Alpine Linux Security Update for xen
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