x86/AMD: Debug Mask handling

[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] AMD CPUs since ~2014 have extensions to normal x86 debugging functionality. Xen supports guests using these extensions. Unfortunately there are errors in Xen's handling of the guest state, leading to denials of service. 1) CVE-2023-34327 - An HVM vCPU can end up operating in the context of a previous vCPUs debug mask state. 2) CVE-2023-34328 - A PV vCPU can place a breakpoint over the live GDT. This allows the PV vCPU to exploit XSA-156 / CVE-2015-8104 and lock up the CPU entirely.

x86/AMD: missing IOMMU TLB flushing

The caching invalidation guidelines from the AMD-Vi specification (48882—Rev 3.07-PUB—Oct 2022) is incorrect on some hardware, as devices will malfunction (see stale DMA mappings) if some fields of the DTE are updated but the IOMMU TLB is not flushed. Such stale DMA mappings can point to memory ranges not owned by the guest, thus allowing access to unindented memory regions.

Multiple vulnerabilities in libfsimage disk handling

[This CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] libfsimage contains parsing code for several filesystems, most of them based on grub-legacy code. libfsimage is used by pygrub to inspect guest disks. Pygrub runs as the same user as the toolstack (root in a priviledged domain). At least one issue has been reported to the Xen Security Team that allows an attacker to trigger a stack buffer overflow in libfsimage. After further analisys the Xen Security Team is no longer confident in the suitability of libfsimage when run against guest controlled input with super user priviledges. In order to not affect current deployments that rely on pygrub patches are provided in the resolution section of the advisory that allow running pygrub in deprivileged mode. CVE-2023-4949 refers to the original issue in the upstream grub project ("An attacker with local access to a system (either through a disk or external drive) can present a modified XFS partition to grub-legacy in such a way to exploit a memory corruption in grub’s XFS file system implementation.") CVE-2023-34325 refers specifically to the vulnerabilities in Xen's copy of libfsimage, which is decended from a very old version of grub.

Possible deadlock in Linux kernel event handling

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).

xenstored: A transaction conflict can crash C Xenstored

When a transaction is committed, C Xenstored will first check the quota is correct before attempting to commit any nodes. It would be possible that accounting is temporarily negative if a node has been removed outside of the transaction. Unfortunately, some versions of C Xenstored are assuming that the quota cannot be negative and are using assert() to confirm it. This will lead to C Xenstored crash when tools are built without -DNDEBUG (this is the default).

top-level shadow reference dropped too early for 64-bit PV guests

For migration as well as to work around kernels unaware of L1TF (see XSA-273), PV guests may be run in shadow paging mode. Since Xen itself needs to be mapped when PV guests run, Xen and shadowed PV guests run directly the respective shadow page tables. For 64-bit PV guests this means running on the shadow of the guest root page table. In the course of dealing with shortage of memory in the shadow pool associated with a domain, shadows of page tables may be torn down. This tearing down may include the shadow root page table that the CPU in question is presently running on. While a precaution exists to supposedly prevent the tearing down of the underlying live page table, the time window covered by that precaution isn't large enough.

arm32: The cache may not be properly cleaned/invalidated

Arm provides multiple helpers to clean & invalidate the cache for a given region. This is, for instance, used when allocating guest memory to ensure any writes (such as the ones during scrubbing) have reached memory before handing over the page to a guest. Unfortunately, the arithmetics in the helpers can overflow and would then result to skip the cache cleaning/invalidation. Therefore there is no guarantee when all the writes will reach the memory.

arm: Guests can trigger a deadlock on Cortex-A77

Cortex-A77 cores (r0p0 and r1p0) are affected by erratum 1508412 where software, under certain circumstances, could deadlock a core due to the execution of either a load to device or non-cacheable memory, and either a store exclusive or register read of the Physical Address Register (PAR_EL1) in close proximity.

x86: shadow stack vs exceptions from emulation stubs

Recent x86 CPUs offer functionality named Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). A sub-feature of this are Shadow Stacks (CET-SS). CET-SS is a hardware feature designed to protect against Return Oriented Programming attacks. When enabled, traditional stacks holding both data and return addresses are accompanied by so called "shadow stacks", holding little more than return addresses. Shadow stacks aren't writable by normal instructions, and upon function returns their contents are used to check for possible manipulation of a return address coming from the traditional stack. In particular certain memory accesses need intercepting by Xen. In various cases the necessary emulation involves kind of replaying of the instruction. Such replaying typically involves filling and then invoking of a stub. Such a replayed instruction may raise an exceptions, which is expected and dealt with accordingly. Unfortunately the interaction of both of the above wasn't right: Recovery involves removal of a call frame from the (traditional) stack. The counterpart of this operation for the shadow stack was missing.

arm32: The cache may not be properly cleaned/invalidated (take two)

Arm provides multiple helpers to clean & invalidate the cache for a given region. This is, for instance, used when allocating guest memory to ensure any writes (such as the ones during scrubbing) have reached memory before handing over the page to a guest. Unfortunately, the arithmetics in the helpers can overflow and would then result to skip the cache cleaning/invalidation. Therefore there is no guarantee when all the writes will reach the memory. This undefined behavior was meant to be addressed by XSA-437, but the approach was not sufficient.

xen/netfront: fix crash when removing device

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: xen/netfront: fix crash when removing device When removing a netfront device directly after a suspend/resume cycle it might happen that the queues have not been setup again, causing a crash during the attempt to stop the queues another time. Fix that by checking the queues are existing before trying to stop them. This is XSA-465 / CVE-2024-53240.

Deadlock in x86 HVM standard VGA handling

The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a deadlock. This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but was analysed incorrectly and the fix was incomplete. Analysis in light of the new finding cannot find a way to make the existing locking discipline work. In staging, this logic has all been removed because it was discovered to be accidentally disabled since Xen 4.7. Therefore, we are fixing the locking problem by backporting the removal of most of the feature. Note that even with the feature disabled, the lock would still be acquired for any accesses to the VGA MMIO region.

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory - - by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path - - by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible - - by accessing many nodes inside a transaction

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory - - by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path - - by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible - - by accessing many nodes inside a transaction

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory - - by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path - - by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible - - by accessing many nodes inside a transaction

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory - - by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path - - by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible - - by accessing many nodes inside a transaction

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory - - by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path - - by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible - - by accessing many nodes inside a transaction

x86: unintended memory sharing between guests On Intel systems that support the "virtualize APIC accesses" feature, a guest can read and write the global shared xAPIC page by moving the local APIC out of xAPIC mode. Access to this shared page bypasses the expected isolation that should exist between two guests.

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory - - by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path - - by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible - - by accessing many nodes inside a transaction

Xenstore: guests can let run xenstored out of memory T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] Malicious guests can cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory, eventually resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) of xenstored. There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored: - - by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory - - by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path - - by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible - - by accessing many nodes inside a transaction