Improper Check for Dropped Privileges

Summary

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 to 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 the shortage of memory in the shadow pool associated with a domain, the 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. This issue affects the package xen versions 3.2.0-rc1 through RELEASE-4.14.6, 4.15.0-rc1 through RELEASE-4.15.5, 4.16.0-rc1 through RELEASE-4.16.5 and 4.17.0-rc1 through RELEASE-4.17.2.