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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2020-25599

Severity High
Score 7/10

Summary

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There are evtchn_reset() race conditions. Uses of EVTCHNOP_reset (potentially by a guest on itself) or XEN_DOMCTL_soft_reset (by itself covered by XSA-77) can lead to the violation of various internal assumptions. This may lead to out of bounds memory accesses or triggering of bug checks. In particular, x86 PV guests may be able to elevate their privilege to that of the host. Host and guest crashes are also possible, leading to a Denial of Service (DoS). Information leaks cannot be ruled out. All Xen versions from 4.5 onwards are vulnerable. Xen versions 4.4 and earlier are not vulnerable.

  • HIGH
  • LOCAL
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • HIGH
  • HIGH

CWE-119 - Buffer Overflow

Buffer overflow attacks involve data transit and operations exceeding the restricted memory buffer, thereby corrupting or overwriting data in adjacent memory locations. Such overflow allows the attacker to run arbitrary code or manipulate the existing code to cause privilege escalation, data breach, denial of service, system crash and even complete system compromise. Given that languages such as C and C++ lack default safeguards against overwriting or accessing data in their memory, applications utilizing these languages are most susceptible to buffer overflows attacks.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published