For a brief summary of Xapi terminology, see: https://xapi-project.github.io/xen-api/overview.html#object-model-overview Xapi contains functionality to backup and restore metadata about Virtual Machines and Storage Repositories (SRs). The metadata itself is stored in a Virtual Disk Image (VDI) inside an SR. This is used for two purposes; a general backup of metadata (e.g. to recover from a host failure if the filer is still good), and Portable SRs (e.g. using an external hard drive to move VMs to another host). Metadata is only restored as an explicit administrator action, but occurs in cases where the host has no information about the SR, and must locate the metadata VDI in order to retrieve the metadata. The metadata VDI is located by searching (in UUID alphanumeric order) each VDI, mounting it, and seeing if there is a suitable metadata file present. The first matching VDI is deemed to be the metadata VDI, and is restored from. In the general case, the content of VDIs a…

A cross-privilege Spectre v2 vulnerability allows attackers to bypass all deployed mitigations, including the recent Fine(IBT), and to leak arbitrary Linux kernel memory on Intel systems.

PVH guests have their ACPI tables constructed by the toolstack. The construction involves building the tables in local memory, which are then copied into guest memory. While actually used parts of the local memory are filled in correctly, excess space that is being allocated is left with its prior contents.

The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a deadlock. This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but was analysed incorrectly and the fix was incomplete. Analysis in light of the new finding cannot find a way to make the existing locking discipline work. In staging, this logic has all been removed because it was discovered to be accidentally disabled since Xen 4.7. Therefore, we are fixing the locking problem by backporting the removal of most of the fea…

In x86's APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) architecture, error conditions are reported in a status register. Furthermore, the OS can opt to receive an interrupt when a new error occurs. It is possible to configure the error interrupt with an illegal vector, which generates an error when an error interrupt is raised. This case causes Xen to recurse through vlapic_error(). The recursion itself is bounded; errors accumulate in the the status register and only generate an interrupt when a new status bit becomes set. However, the lock protecting this state in Xen will try to be taken recursively, and deadlock.

When multiple devices share resources and one of them is to be passed through to a guest, security of the entire system and of respective guests individually cannot really be guaranteed without knowing internals of any of the involved guests. Therefore such a configuration cannot really be security-supported, yet making that explicit was so far missing. Resources the sharing of which is known to be problematic include, but are not limited to - - PCI Base Address Registers (BARs) of multiple devices mapping to the same page (4k on x86), - - INTx lines.

Certain PCI devices in a system might be assigned Reserved Memory Regions (specified via Reserved Memory Region Reporting, "RMRR") for Intel VT-d or Unity Mapping ranges for AMD-Vi. These are typically used for platform tasks such as legacy USB emulation. Since the precise purpose of these regions is unknown, once a device associated with such a region is active, the mappings of these regions need to remain continuouly accessible by the device. In the logic establishing these mappings, error handling was flawed, resulting in such mappings to potentially remain in place when they should have been removed again. Respective guests would then gain access to memory regions which they aren't supposed to have access to.

An optional feature of PCI MSI called "Multiple Message" allows a device to use multiple consecutive interrupt vectors. Unlike for MSI-X, the setting up of these consecutive vectors needs to happen all in one go. In this handling an error path could be taken in different situations, with or without a particular lock held. This error path wrongly releases the lock even when it is not currently held.

Xenforo before 2.2.16 allows code injection.

Xenforo before 2.2.16 allows CSRF.