CVE-2023-46836
Published: 5 January 2024
The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled. However, the original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown (XPTI) deliberately left interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active. As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.
Notes
| Author | Note |
|---|---|
| mdeslaur | hypervisor packages are in universe. For issues in the hypervisor, add appropriate tags to each section, ex: Tags_xen: universe-binary |
Priority
Status
| Package | Release | Status |
|---|---|---|
|
xen Launchpad, Ubuntu, Debian |
bionic |
Needs triage
|
| focal |
Needs triage
|
|
| jammy |
Needs triage
|
|
| lunar |
Ignored
(end of life, was needs-triage)
|
|
| mantic |
Needs triage
|
|
| noble |
Needs triage
|
|
| trusty |
Ignored
(end of standard support)
|
|
| upstream |
Needs triage
|
|
| xenial |
Needs triage
|
|
| Binaries built from this source package are in Universe and so are supported by the community. | ||
Severity score breakdown
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Base score | 4.7 |
| Attack vector | Local |
| Attack complexity | High |
| Privileges required | Low |
| User interaction | None |
| Scope | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | High |
| Integrity impact | None |
| Availability impact | None |
| Vector | CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N |