Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions in Xen - CVE-2020-11743
Published: July 28, 2020 / Updated: October 19, 2022
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote user to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of a bad error path in GNTTABOP_map_grant. Grant table operations are expected to return 0 for success, and a negative number for errors. Some misplaced brackets cause one error path to return 1 instead of a negative value. The grant table code in Linux treats this condition as success, and proceeds with incorrectly initialised state. A buggy or malicious guest can construct its grant table in such a way that, when a backend domain tries to map a grant, it hits the incorrect error path. This will crash a Linux based dom0 or backend domain.
Affected software
Gentoo Linux
Debian Linux
Opensuse
Ubuntu
Fedora
xen (Alpine package)
xen
libxengnttab1 (Ubuntu package)
xen-hypervisor-4.11-amd64 (Ubuntu package)
xen-hypervisor-4.11-armhf (Ubuntu package)
libxenmisc4.11 (Ubuntu package)
libxendevicemodel1 (Ubuntu package)
xenstore-utils (Ubuntu package)
xen-utils-4.11 (Ubuntu package)
xen-hypervisor-4.11-arm64 (Ubuntu package)
xen-utils-common (Ubuntu package)
libxenevtchn1 (Ubuntu package)
xen (Debian package)
How to mitigate CVE-2020-11743
xen - addressed in versions 4.11.3-4.fc30, 4.11.4-1.fc30, 4.12.2-3.fc31, 4.13.0-7.fc32
libxengnttab1 (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
xen-hypervisor-4.11-amd64 (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
xen-hypervisor-4.11-armhf (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
libxenmisc4.11 (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
libxendevicemodel1 (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
xenstore-utils (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
xen-utils-4.11 (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
xen-hypervisor-4.11-arm64 (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
xen-utils-common (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
libxenevtchn1 (Ubuntu package) - update to 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
xen (Debian package) - update to 4.11.4+24-gddaaccbbab-1~deb10u1
External References
- http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-05/msg00006.html
- http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/04/14/3
- http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-316.html
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/5M2XRNCHOGGTJQBZQJ7DCV6ZNAKN3LE2/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/NVTP4OYHCTRU3ONFJOFJQVNDFB25KLLG/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/YMAW7D2MP6RE4BFI5BZWOBBWGY3VSOFN/
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202005-08
- https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4723
- https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-316.html