Attacker Value
Unknown
(0 users assessed)
Exploitability
Unknown
(0 users assessed)
User Interaction
None
Privileges Required
High
Attack Vector
Physical
0

CVE-2019-19577

Disclosure Date: December 11, 2019
Add MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques that apply to this CVE.

Description

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 AMD HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service or possibly gain privileges by triggering data-structure access during pagetable-height updates. When running on AMD systems with an IOMMU, Xen attempted to dynamically adapt the number of levels of pagetables (the pagetable height) in the IOMMU according to the guest’s address space size. The code to select and update the height had several bugs. Notably, the update was done without taking a lock which is necessary for safe operation. A malicious guest administrator can cause Xen to access data structures while they are being modified, causing Xen to crash. Privilege escalation is thought to be very difficult but cannot be ruled out. Additionally, there is a potential memory leak of 4kb per guest boot, under memory pressure. Only Xen on AMD CPUs is vulnerable. Xen running on Intel CPUs is not vulnerable. ARM systems are not vulnerable. Only systems where guests are given direct access to physical devices are vulnerable. Systems which do not use PCI pass-through are not vulnerable. Only HVM guests can exploit the vulnerability. PV and PVH guests cannot. All versions of Xen with IOMMU support are vulnerable.

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CVSS V3 Severity and Metrics
Base Score:
7.2 High
Impact Score:
6
Exploitability Score:
0.5
Vector:
CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Attack Vector (AV):
Physical
Attack Complexity (AC):
Low
Privileges Required (PR):
High
User Interaction (UI):
None
Scope (S):
Changed
Confidentiality (C):
High
Integrity (I):
High
Availability (A):
High

General Information

Vendors

  • fedoraproject,
  • xen

Products

  • fedora 31,
  • xen
Technical Analysis