Denial of service in Xen - CVE-2018-15468
Published: August 21, 2018
Vulnerability identifier: #VU14476
CSH Severity: Low
CVSS v4: 6.8 [CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:L/AT:N/PR:H/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: CVE-2018-15468
CWE-ID: CWE-264
Exploitation vector: Adjecent network
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows an adjacent administrative attacker to cause DoS condition on the target system.
The vulnerability exists due to the DEBUGCTL MSR contains several debugging features, some of which virtualise cleanly, but some do not when Branch Trace Store is not virtualised by the processor. An adjacent attacker can lock up the entire host, choose any MSR_DEBUGCTL setting it likes and cause the service to crash.
Affected software
Xen
Gentoo Linux
Opensuse
Fedora
xen (Alpine package)
xen
Gentoo Linux
Opensuse
Fedora
xen (Alpine package)
xen
How to mitigate CVE-2018-15468
Install update from vendor's website.
xen (Alpine package) - update to 4.8.5-r0
xen - addressed in versions 4.9.2-7.fc27, 4.10.1-6.fc28
xen - addressed in versions 4.9.2-7.fc27, 4.10.1-6.fc28