inadequate grant-v2 status frames array bounds check The v2 grant table interface separates grant attributes from grant status. That is, when operating in this mode, a guest has two tables. As a result, guests also need to be able to retrieve the addresses that the new status tracking table can be accessed through. For 32-bit guests on x86, translation of requests has to occur because the interface structure layouts commonly differ between 32- and 64-bit. The translation of the request to obtain the frame numbers of the grant status table involves translating the resulting array of frame numbers. Since the space used to carry out the translation is limited, the translation layer tells the core function the capacity of the array within translation space. Unfortunately the core function then only enforces array bounds to be below 8 times the specified value, and would write past the available space if enough frame numbers needed storing.

long running loops in grant table handling In order to properly monitor resource use, Xen maintains information on the grant mappings a domain may create to map grants offered by other domains. In the process of carrying out certain actions, Xen would iterate over all such entries, including ones which aren't in use anymore and some which may have been created but never used. If the number of entries for a given domain is large enough, this iterating of the entire table may tie up a CPU for too long, starving other domains or causing issues in the hypervisor itself. Note that a domain may map its own grants, i.e. there is no need for multiple domains to be involved here. A pair of "cooperating" guests may, however, cause the effects to be more severe.

grant table v2 status pages may remain accessible after de-allocation Guest get permitted access to certain Xen-owned pages of memory. The majority of such pages remain allocated / associated with a guest for its entire lifetime. Grant table v2 status pages, however, get de-allocated when a guest switched (back) from v2 to v1. The freeing of such pages requires that the hypervisor know where in the guest these pages were mapped. The hypervisor tracks only one use within guest space, but racing requests from the guest to insert mappings of these pages may result in any of them to become mapped in multiple locations. Upon switching back from v2 to v1, the guest would then retain access to a page that was freed and perhaps re-used for other purposes.

IOMMU page mapping issues on x86 T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Both AMD and Intel allow ACPI tables to specify regions of memory which should be left untranslated, which typically means these addresses should pass the translation phase unaltered. While these are typically device specific ACPI properties, they can also be specified to apply to a range of devices, or even all devices. On all systems with such regions Xen failed to prevent guests from undoing/replacing such mappings (CVE-2021-28694). On AMD systems, where a discontinuous range is specified by firmware, the supposedly-excluded middle range will also be identity-mapped (CVE-2021-28695). Further, on AMD systems, upon de-assigment of a physical device from a guest, the identity mappings would be left in place, allowing a guest continued access to ranges of memory which it shouldn't have access to anymore (CVE-2021-28696).

IOMMU page mapping issues on x86 T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Both AMD and Intel allow ACPI tables to specify regions of memory which should be left untranslated, which typically means these addresses should pass the translation phase unaltered. While these are typically device specific ACPI properties, they can also be specified to apply to a range of devices, or even all devices. On all systems with such regions Xen failed to prevent guests from undoing/replacing such mappings (CVE-2021-28694). On AMD systems, where a discontinuous range is specified by firmware, the supposedly-excluded middle range will also be identity-mapped (CVE-2021-28695). Further, on AMD systems, upon de-assigment of a physical device from a guest, the identity mappings would be left in place, allowing a guest continued access to ranges of memory which it shouldn't have access to anymore (CVE-2021-28696).

IOMMU page mapping issues on x86 T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Both AMD and Intel allow ACPI tables to specify regions of memory which should be left untranslated, which typically means these addresses should pass the translation phase unaltered. While these are typically device specific ACPI properties, they can also be specified to apply to a range of devices, or even all devices. On all systems with such regions Xen failed to prevent guests from undoing/replacing such mappings (CVE-2021-28694). On AMD systems, where a discontinuous range is specified by firmware, the supposedly-excluded middle range will also be identity-mapped (CVE-2021-28695). Further, on AMD systems, upon de-assigment of a physical device from a guest, the identity mappings would be left in place, allowing a guest continued access to ranges of memory which it shouldn't have access to anymore (CVE-2021-28696).

xen/arm: Boot modules are not scrubbed The bootloader will load boot modules (e.g. kernel, initramfs...) in a temporary area before they are copied by Xen to each domain memory. To ensure sensitive data is not leaked from the modules, Xen must "scrub" them before handing the page over to the allocator. Unfortunately, it was discovered that modules will not be scrubbed on Arm.

inappropriate x86 IOMMU timeout detection / handling IOMMUs process commands issued to them in parallel with the operation of the CPU(s) issuing such commands. In the current implementation in Xen, asynchronous notification of the completion of such commands is not used. Instead, the issuing CPU spin-waits for the completion of the most recently issued command(s). Some of these waiting loops try to apply a timeout to fail overly-slow commands. The course of action upon a perceived timeout actually being detected is inappropriate: - on Intel hardware guests which did not originally cause the timeout may be marked as crashed, - on AMD hardware higher layer callers would not be notified of the issue, making them continue as if the IOMMU operation succeeded.

x86: TSX Async Abort protections not restored after S3 This issue relates to the TSX Async Abort speculative security vulnerability. Please see https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-305.html for details. Mitigating TAA by disabling TSX (the default and preferred option) requires selecting a non-default setting in MSR_TSX_CTRL. This setting isn't restored after S3 suspend.

HVM soft-reset crashes toolstack libxl requires all data structures passed across its public interface to be initialized before use and disposed of afterwards by calling a specific set of functions. Many internal data structures also require this initialize / dispose discipline, but not all of them. When the "soft reset" feature was implemented, the libxl__domain_suspend_state structure didn't require any initialization or disposal. At some point later, an initialization function was introduced for the structure; but the "soft reset" path wasn't refactored to call the initialization function. When a guest nwo initiates a "soft reboot", uninitialized data structure leads to an assert() when later code finds the structure in an unexpected state. The effect of this is to crash the process monitoring the guest. How this affects the system depends on the structure of the toolstack. For xl, this will have no security-relevant effect: every VM has its own independent monitoring process, which contains no state. The domain in question will hang in a crashed state, but can be destroyed by `xl destroy` just like any other non-cooperating domain. For daemon-based toolstacks linked against libxl, such as libvirt, this will crash the toolstack, losing the state of any in-progress operations (localized DoS), and preventing further administrator operations unless the daemon is configured to restart automatically (system-wide DoS). If crashes "leak" resources, then repeated crashes could use up resources, also causing a system-wide DoS.

Potential floating point value injection in all supported CPU products, in conjunction with software vulnerabilities relating to speculative execution with incorrect floating point results, may cause the use of incorrect data from FPVI and may result in data leakage.

Potential speculative code store bypass in all supported CPU products, in conjunction with software vulnerabilities relating to speculative execution of overwritten instructions, may cause an incorrect speculation and could result in data leakage.

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.9 through 4.14.x. On Arm, a guest is allowed to control whether memory accesses are bypassing the cache. This means that Xen needs to ensure that all writes (such as the ones during scrubbing) have reached the memory before handing over the page to a guest. Unfortunately, the operation to clean the cache is happening before checking if the page was scrubbed. Therefore there is no guarantee when all the writes will reach the memory.

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.12.3 through 4.12.4 and 4.13.1 through 4.14.x. An x86 HVM guest with PCI pass through devices can force the allocation of all IDT vectors on the system by rebooting itself with MSI or MSI-X capabilities enabled and entries setup. Such reboots will leak any vectors used by the MSI(-X) entries that the guest might had enabled, and hence will lead to vector exhaustion on the system, not allowing further PCI pass through devices to work properly. HVM guests with PCI pass through devices can mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack affecting the pass through of PCI devices to other guests or the hardware domain. In the latter case, this would affect the entire host.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Nodes in xenstore have an ownership. In oxenstored, a owner could give a node away. However, node ownership has quota implications. Any guest can run another guest out of quota, or create an unbounded number of nodes owned by dom0, thus running xenstored out of memory A malicious guest administrator can cause a denial of service against a specific guest or against the whole host. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.6 through 4.14.x. When acting upon a guest XS_RESET_WATCHES request, not all tracking information is freed. A guest can cause unbounded memory usage in oxenstored. This can lead to a system-wide DoS. Only systems using the Ocaml Xenstored implementation are vulnerable. Systems using the C Xenstored implementation are not vulnerable.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. When a Xenstore watch fires, the xenstore client that registered the watch will receive a Xenstore message containing the path of the modified Xenstore entry that triggered the watch, and the tag that was specified when registering the watch. Any communication with xenstored is done via Xenstore messages, consisting of a message header and the payload. The payload length is limited to 4096 bytes. Any request to xenstored resulting in a response with a payload longer than 4096 bytes will result in an error. When registering a watch, the payload length limit applies to the combined length of the watched path and the specified tag. Because watches for a specific path are also triggered for all nodes below that path, the payload of a watch event message can be longer than the payload needed to register the watch. A malicious guest that registers a watch using a very large tag (i.e., with a registration operation payload length close to the 4096 byte limit) can cause the generation of watch events with a payload length larger than 4096 bytes, by writing to Xenstore entries below the watched path. This will result in an error condition in xenstored. This error can result in a NULL pointer dereference, leading to a crash of xenstored. A malicious guest administrator can cause xenstored to crash, leading to a denial of service. Following a xenstored crash, domains may continue to run, but management operations will be impossible. Only C xenstored is affected, oxenstored is not affected.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Xenstored and guests communicate via a shared memory page using a specific protocol. When a guest violates this protocol, xenstored will drop the connection to that guest. Unfortunately, this is done by just removing the guest from xenstored's internal management, resulting in the same actions as if the guest had been destroyed, including sending an @releaseDomain event. @releaseDomain events do not say that the guest has been removed. All watchers of this event must look at the states of all guests to find the guest that has been removed. When an @releaseDomain is generated due to a domain xenstored protocol violation, because the guest is still running, the watchers will not react. Later, when the guest is actually destroyed, xenstored will no longer have it stored in its internal data base, so no further @releaseDomain event will be sent. This can lead to a zombie domain; memory mappings of that guest's memory will not be removed, due to the missing event. This zombie domain will be cleaned up only after another domain is destroyed, as that will trigger another @releaseDomain event. If the device model of the guest that violated the Xenstore protocol is running in a stub-domain, a use-after-free case could happen in xenstored, after having removed the guest from its internal data base, possibly resulting in a crash of xenstored. A malicious guest can block resources of the host for a period after its own death. Guests with a stub domain device model can eventually crash xenstored, resulting in a more serious denial of service (the prevention of any further domain management operations). Only the C variant of Xenstore is affected; the Ocaml variant is not affected. Only HVM guests with a stubdom device model can cause a serious DoS.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. A guest may access xenstore paths via absolute paths containing a full pathname, or via a relative path, which implicitly includes /local/domain/$DOMID for their own domain id. Management tools must access paths in guests' namespaces, necessarily using absolute paths. oxenstored imposes a pathname limit that is applied solely to the relative or absolute path specified by the client. Therefore, a guest can create paths in its own namespace which are too long for management tools to access. Depending on the toolstack in use, a malicious guest administrator might cause some management tools and debugging operations to fail. For example, a guest administrator can cause "xenstore-ls -r" to fail. However, a guest administrator cannot prevent the host administrator from tearing down the domain. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Access rights of Xenstore nodes are per domid. Unfortunately, existing granted access rights are not removed when a domain is being destroyed. This means that a new domain created with the same domid will inherit the access rights to Xenstore nodes from the previous domain(s) with the same domid. Because all Xenstore entries of a guest below /local/domain/<domid> are being deleted by Xen tools when a guest is destroyed, only Xenstore entries of other guests still running are affected. For example, a newly created guest domain might be able to read sensitive information that had belonged to a previously existing guest domain. Both Xenstore implementations (C and Ocaml) are vulnerable.