CVEvulnerability

CVE-2018-15468

6.0 MEDIUM Published 2018-08-17 Modified 2026-06-17 Official page ↗
Status
Modified
Published
2018-08-17
Last modified
2026-06-17
Assigner
[email protected]
CVSS 3.0 ([email protected])
6.0 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.0 ([email protected])
4.9 MEDIUM — AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C
Weaknesses
CWE-863

Description

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x. The DEBUGCTL MSR contains several debugging features, some of which virtualise cleanly, but some do not. In particular, Branch Trace Store is not virtualised by the processor, and software has to be careful to configure it suitably not to lock up the core. As a result, it must only be available to fully trusted guests. Unfortunately, in the case that vPMU is disabled, all value checking was skipped, allowing the guest to choose any MSR_DEBUGCTL setting it likes. A malicious or buggy guest administrator (on Intel x86 HVM or PVH) can lock up the entire host, causing a Denial of Service.

Affected configurations

• xen xen (<= 4.11.0)

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-863 Incorrect Authorization weakness

References