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CVE-2020-25596

Publication date 23 September 2020

Last updated 24 July 2024

Ubuntu priority

Medium

Why this priority?

Cvss 3 Severity Score

5.5 · Medium

Score breakdown

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. x86 PV guest kernels can experience denial of service via SYSENTER. The SYSENTER instruction leaves various state sanitization activities to software. One of Xen's sanitization paths injects a #GP fault, and incorrectly delivers it twice to the guest. This causes the guest kernel to observe a kernel-privilege #GP fault (typically fatal) rather than a user-privilege #GP fault (usually converted into SIGSEGV/etc.). Malicious or buggy userspace can crash the guest kernel, resulting in a VM Denial of Service. All versions of Xen from 3.2 onwards are vulnerable. Only x86 systems are vulnerable. ARM platforms are not vulnerable. Only x86 systems that support the SYSENTER instruction in 64bit mode are vulnerable. This is believed to be Intel, Centaur, and Shanghai CPUs. AMD and Hygon CPUs are not believed to be vulnerable. Only x86 PV guests can exploit the vulnerability. x86 PVH / HVM guests cannot exploit the vulnerability.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
xen 24.10 oracular
Not affected
24.04 LTS noble
Not affected
23.10 mantic
Not affected
23.04 lunar
Not affected
22.10 kinetic
Not affected
22.04 LTS jammy
Not affected
21.10 impish Ignored end of life
21.04 hirsute Ignored end of life
20.10 groovy Ignored end of life
20.04 LTS focal
Fixed 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
18.04 LTS bionic
Vulnerable
16.04 LTS xenial
Vulnerable
14.04 LTS trusty Not in release

Notes

mdeslaur

hypervisor packages are in universe. For issues in the hypervisor, add appropriate tags to each section, ex: Tags_xen: universe-binary

Severity score breakdown

Parameter Value
Base score 5.5 · Medium
Attack vector Local
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required Low
User interaction None
Scope Unchanged
Confidentiality None
Integrity impact None
Availability impact High
Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

    • USN-5617-1
    • Xen vulnerabilities
    • 19 September 2022

Other references