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Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

CVE-2018-15470

Medium
6.5/10

Summary

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x. The logic in oxenstored for handling writes depended on the order of evaluation of expressions making up a tuple. As indicated in section 7.7.3 "Operations on data structures" of the OCaml manual, the order of evaluation of subexpressions is not specified. In practice, different implementations behave differently. Thus, oxenstored may not enforce the configured quota-maxentity. This allows a malicious or buggy guest to write as many xenstore entries as it wishes, causing unbounded memory usage in oxenstored. This can lead to a system-wide DoS.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • CHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-400 - Uncontrolled resource consumption

An uncontrolled resource allocation attack (also known as resource exhaustion attack) triggers unauthorized overconsumption of the limited resources in an application, such as memory, file system storage, database connection pool entries, and CPU. This may lead to denial of service for valid users and degradation of the application's functionality as well as that of the host operating system.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published