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CVE-2023-46842mediumCWE-843

x86 HVM hypercalls may trigger Xen bug check

13Vexday Risk Score

No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.

ssvc Trackcvss 6.5epss 8.5%
exploitation probability
8.5%top 5% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
In short

HVM virtual machines in Xen can crash the hypervisor by switching between processor modes and setting CPU registers to invalid values during long-running hypercalls. This causes a safety check in the hypervisor to fail, bringing down the system.

Technical detail

CWE-843 (Type Confusion) vulnerability in Xen's HVM hypercall handling where mode-switching guests can set 32-bit hypercall argument registers to 64-bit values that violate internal sanity checks during hypercall continuation, triggering a hypervisor crash via assertion failure.

Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
Unlike 32-bit PV guests, HVM guests may switch freely between 64-bit and other modes. This in particular means that they may set registers used to pass 32-bit-mode hypercall arguments to values outside of the range 32-bit code would be able to set them to. When processing of hypercalls takes a considerable amount of time, the hypervisor may choose to invoke a hypercall continuation. Doing so involves putting (perhaps updated) hypercall arguments in respective registers. For guests not running in 64-bit mode this further involves a certain amount of translation of the values. Unfortunately internal sanity checking of these translated values assumes high halves of registers to always be clear when invoking a hypercall. When this is found not to be the case, it triggers a consistency check in the hypervisor and causes a crash.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
Xen · Xen