An issue was discovered in Xen XAPI before 2020-12-15.
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
Summary
An issue was discovered in Xen XAPI before 2020-12-15. Certain xenstore keys provide feedback from the guest, and are therefore watched by toolstack. Specifically, keys are watched by xenopsd, and data are forwarded via RPC through message-switch to xapi. The watching logic in xenopsd sends one RPC update containing all data, any time any single xenstore key is updated, and therefore has O(N^2) time complexity. Furthermore, message-switch retains recent (currently 128) RPC messages for diagnostic purposes, yielding O(M*N) space complexity. The quantity of memory a single guest can monopolise is bounded by xenstored quota, but the quota is fairly large. It is believed to be in excess of 1G per malicious guest. In practice, this manifests as a host denial of service, either through message-switch thrashing against swap, or OOMing entirely, depending on dom0's configuration. (There are no quotas in xenopsd to limit the quantity of keys that result in RPC traffic.) A buggy or malicious guest can cause unreasonable memory usage in dom0, resulting in a host denial of service. All versions of XAPI are vulnerable. Systems that are not using the XAPI toolstack are not vulnerable.
Timeline
- CVE published
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- n/a n/a
Version range not reported