KVM: x86: Mark target gfn of emulated atomic instruction as dirty

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: x86: Mark target gfn of emulated atomic instruction as dirty When emulating an atomic access on behalf of the guest, mark the target gfn dirty if the CMPXCHG by KVM is attempted and doesn't fault. This fixes a bug where KVM effectively corrupts guest memory during live migration by writing to guest memory without informing userspace that the page is dirty. Marking the page dirty got unintentionally dropped when KVM's emulated CMPXCHG was converted to do a user access. Before that, KVM explicitly mapped the guest page into kernel memory, and marked the page dirty during the unmap phase. Mark the page dirty even if the CMPXCHG fails, as the old data is written back on failure, i.e. the page is still written. The value written is guaranteed to be the same because the operation is atomic, but KVM's ABI is that all writes are dirty logged regardless of the value written. And more importantly, that's what KVM did before the buggy commit. Huge kudos to the folks on the Cc list (and many others), who did all the actual work of triaging and debugging. base-commit: 6769ea8da8a93ed4630f1ce64df6aafcaabfce64

Timeline

1. May 17, 2024, 1:23 PM UTCCVE published
2. May 17, 2024, 5:16 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. Aug 5, 2026, 11:30 AM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• Linux Linux

  From 5.15.58 · fixed in 5.15.154; From 5.17.13 · fixed in 5.18; From 5.18.2 · fixed in 5.19

• Linux Linux

  5.19

References 5