CVE-2023-34324

Published: 11 October 2023

Closing of an event channel in the Linux kernel can result in a deadlock. This happens when the close is being performed in parallel to an unrelated Xen console action and the handling of a Xen console interrupt in an unprivileged guest. The closing of an event channel is e.g. triggered by removal of a paravirtual device on the other side. As this action will cause console messages to be issued on the other side quite often, the chance of triggering the deadlock is not neglectable. Note that 32-bit Arm-guests are not affected, as the 32-bit Linux kernel on Arm doesn't use queued-RW-locks, which are required to trigger the issue (on Arm32 a waiting writer doesn't block further readers to get the lock).

From the Ubuntu Security Team

Marek Marczykowski-Górecki discovered that the Xen event channel infrastructure implementation in the Linux kernel contained a race condition. An attacker in a guest VM could possibly use this to cause a denial of service (paravirtualized device unavailability).

Status

Severity score breakdown

References

• https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-441.html
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6461-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6624-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6625-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6626-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6625-2
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6628-1
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6626-2
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6628-2
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6626-3
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6625-3
• https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-6652-1
• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-34324
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian

Bugs

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2243164
• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1215745