CVE-2010-3699

Published: 8 December 2010

The backend driver in Xen 3.x allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service via a kernel thread leak, which prevents the device and guest OS from being shut down or create a zombie domain, causes a hang in zenwatch, or prevents unspecified xm commands from working properly, related to (1) netback, (2) blkback, or (3) blktap.

From the Ubuntu Security Team

It was discovered that Xen did not correctly clean up threads. A local attacker in a guest system could exploit this to exhaust host system resources, leading to a denial of serivce.

Notes

The vulnerability described by CVE-2010-3699 probably exists, but
I've not been able to reproduce it. It likely requires more block and
network devices then I have at my disposal. Checked out
http://xenbits.xensource.com/linux-2.6.18-xen.hg and compared. Not all of
the original upstream patch was appropriate since it caused a regression
with udev.

Status

References

• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-1072-1
• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2010-3699
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian