CVE-2019-18421

NameCVE-2019-18421
DescriptionAn issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to gain host OS privileges by leveraging race conditions in pagetable promotion and demotion operations. There are issues with restartable PV type change operations. To avoid using shadow pagetables for PV guests, Xen exposes the actual hardware pagetables to the guest. In order to prevent the guest from modifying these page tables directly, Xen keeps track of how pages are used using a type system; pages must be "promoted" before being used as a pagetable, and "demoted" before being used for any other type. Xen also allows for "recursive" promotions: i.e., an operating system promoting a page to an L4 pagetable may end up causing pages to be promoted to L3s, which may in turn cause pages to be promoted to L2s, and so on. These operations may take an arbitrarily large amount of time, and so must be re-startable. Unfortunately, making recursive pagetable promotion and demotion operations restartable is incredibly complicated, and the code contains several races which, if triggered, can cause Xen to drop or retain extra type counts, potentially allowing guests to get write access to in-use pagetables. A malicious PV guest administrator may be able to escalate their privilege to that of the host. All x86 systems with untrusted PV guests are vulnerable. HVM and PVH guests cannot exercise this vulnerability.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)
ReferencesDSA-4602-1
Debian Bugs947944

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
xen (PTS)jessie, jessie (lts)4.4.4lts5-0+deb8u1vulnerable
stretch (security), stretch (lts), stretch4.8.5.final+shim4.10.4-1+deb9u12fixed
buster (security), buster, buster (lts)4.11.4+107-gef32c7afa2-1fixed
bullseye4.14.6-1fixed
bullseye (security)4.14.5+94-ge49571868d-1fixed
bookworm4.17.3+10-g091466ba55-1~deb12u1fixed
sid, trixie4.17.3+36-g54dacb5c02-1fixed

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
xensourcewheezy(unfixed)end-of-life
xensourcejessie(unfixed)end-of-life
xensourcestretch4.8.5.final+shim4.10.4-1+deb9u12DSA-4602-1
xensourcebuster4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1~deb10u1DSA-4602-1
xensource(unstable)4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1947944

Notes

[jessie] - xen <end-of-life> (Not supported in jessie LTS)
https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-299.html

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