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CVE-2018-15468

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x.

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub

Summary

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x. The DEBUGCTL MSR contains several debugging features, some of which virtualise cleanly, but some do not. In particular, Branch Trace Store is not virtualised by the processor, and software has to be careful to configure it suitably not to lock up the core. As a result, it must only be available to fully trusted guests. Unfortunately, in the case that vPMU is disabled, all value checking was skipped, allowing the guest to choose any MSR_DEBUGCTL setting it likes. A malicious or buggy guest administrator (on Intel x86 HVM or PVH) can lock up the entire host, causing a Denial of Service.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • n/a n/a

    Version range not reported

References 2

xenbits.xen.org

security.gentoo.org