CVE-2019-19577

NameCVE-2019-19577
DescriptionAn issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 AMD HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service or possibly gain privileges by triggering data-structure access during pagetable-height updates. When running on AMD systems with an IOMMU, Xen attempted to dynamically adapt the number of levels of pagetables (the pagetable height) in the IOMMU according to the guest's address space size. The code to select and update the height had several bugs. Notably, the update was done without taking a lock which is necessary for safe operation. A malicious guest administrator can cause Xen to access data structures while they are being modified, causing Xen to crash. Privilege escalation is thought to be very difficult but cannot be ruled out. Additionally, there is a potential memory leak of 4kb per guest boot, under memory pressure. Only Xen on AMD CPUs is vulnerable. Xen running on Intel CPUs is not vulnerable. ARM systems are not vulnerable. Only systems where guests are given direct access to physical devices are vulnerable. Systems which do not use PCI pass-through are not vulnerable. Only HVM guests can exploit the vulnerability. PV and PVH guests cannot. All versions of Xen with IOMMU support are vulnerable.
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
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-311.html

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