CVE-2021-3653

Published: 16 August 2021

A flaw was found in the KVM's AMD code for supporting SVM nested virtualization. The flaw occurs when processing the VMCB (virtual machine control block) provided by the L1 guest to spawn/handle a nested guest (L2). Due to improper validation of the "int_ctl" field, this issue could allow a malicious L1 to enable AVIC support (Advanced Virtual Interrupt Controller) for the L2 guest. As a result, the L2 guest would be allowed to read/write physical pages of the host, resulting in a crash of the entire system, leak of sensitive data or potential guest-to-host escape. This flaw affects Linux kernel versions prior to 5.14-rc7.

From the Ubuntu security team

Maxim Levitsky discovered that the KVM hypervisor implementation for AMD processors in the Linux kernel did not properly prevent a guest VM from enabling AVIC in nested guest VMs. An attacker in a guest VM could use this to write to portions of the host's physical memory.

Notes

trusty libvirt/qemu does not create nested capable VMs by default

Mitigation

Disable nested virtualisation when loading the KVM AMD module:
   modprobe kvm_amd nested=0

Priority

High

CVSS 3 base score: 8.8

Status

References

• https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-3653
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/3d6368ef580a
• https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2021/08/16/1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5062-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5070-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5071-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5072-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5073-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5071-2
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5082-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5073-2
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian