CVE-2020-29479

Publication date 15 December 2020

Last updated 26 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. In the Ocaml xenstored implementation, the internal representation of the tree has special cases for the root node, because this node has no parent. Unfortunately, permissions were not checked for certain operations on the root node. Unprivileged guests can get and modify permissions, list, and delete the root node. (Deleting the whole xenstore tree is a host-wide denial of service.) Achieving xenstore write access is also possible. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
xen	25.10 questing	Not affected
	25.04 plucky	Not affected
	24.10 oracular	Not affected
	24.04 LTS noble	Not affected
	23.10 mantic	Not affected
	23.04 lunar	Not affected
	22.10 kinetic	Not affected
	22.04 LTS jammy	Not affected
	21.10 impish	Ignored end of life
	21.04 hirsute	Ignored end of life
	20.10 groovy	Ignored end of life
	20.04 LTS focal	Vulnerable
	18.04 LTS bionic	Vulnerable
	16.04 LTS xenial	Vulnerable
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not in release

Notes

mdeslaur

hypervisor packages are in universe. For issues in the hypervisor, add appropriate tags to each section, ex: Tags_xen: universe-binary

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	8.8 · High
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	Low
User interaction	None
Scope	Changed
Confidentiality	High
Integrity impact	High
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H