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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2023-46837

Low
3.3/10

Summary

Arm provides multiple helpers to clean & invalidate the cache for a given region. This is, for instance, used when allocating guest memory to ensure any writes (such as the ones during scrubbing) have reached memory before handing over the page to a guest. Unfortunately, the arithmetic's in the helpers can overflow and would then result to skip the cache cleaning/invalidation. Therefore there is no guarantee when all the writes will reach the memory. This undefined behavior was meant to be addressed by XSA-437, but the approach was not sufficient. This issue affects the package xen versions 4.18.0-rc1 through RELEASE-4.18.0.

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

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