Overview
- Description
- 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.
- Source
- security@xen.org
- NVD status
- Analyzed
Risk scores
CVSS 3.1
- Type
- Primary
- Base score
- 4.7
- Impact score
- 3.6
- Exploitability score
- 1
- Vector string
- CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
- Severity
- MEDIUM
Weaknesses
- nvd@nist.gov
- NVD-CWE-noinfo
Social media
- Hype score
- Not currently trending
Configurations
[
{
"nodes": [
{
"negate": false,
"cpeMatch": [
{
"criteria": "cpe:2.3:o:xen:xen:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*",
"vulnerable": true,
"matchCriteriaId": "C2B9CCC2-BAC5-4A65-B8D4-4B71EBBA0C2F"
}
],
"operator": "OR"
}
]
}
]