In Xen 4.10, new infrastructure was introduced as part of an overhaul to how MSR emulation happens for guests. Unfortunately, one tracking structure isn't freed when a vcpu is destroyed. This allows guest OS administrators to cause a denial of service (host OS memory consumption) by rebooting many times.

There are packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability referenced in the following CVE:

  - In Xen 4.10, new infrastructure was introduced as part of an overhaul to how MSR emulation happens for
    guests. Unfortunately, one tracking structure isn't freed when a vcpu is destroyed. This allows guest OS
    administrators to cause a denial of service (host OS memory consumption) by rebooting many times.
    (CVE-2018-5244)

The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-201810-06 (Xen: Multiple vulnerabilities)

    Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Xen. Please review the       referenced CVE identifiers for details.
  Impact :

    A local attacker could cause a Denial of Service condition or disclose       sensitive information.
  Workaround :

    There is no known workaround at this time.

According to its self-reported version number, the Xen hypervisor installed on the remote host is affected by a guest-to-host denial of service vulnerability.

Note that Nessus has checked the changeset versions based on the xen.git change log. Nessus did not check guest hardware configurations or if patches were applied manually to the source code before a recompile and reinstall.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Type	Severity
424658	Alpine: multiple xen packages: security update to 4.10.0-r1	Tenable Cloud Security	Alpine Linux Local Security Checks	Local	medium
424658	Alpine: multiple xen packages: security update to 4.10.0-r1	Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security	Alpine Linux Local Security Checks	Local	medium
118506	GLSA-201810-06 : Xen: Multiple vulnerabilities (Foreshadow) (Meltdown) (Spectre)	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	Local	critical
105775	Xen vcpu Destruction Handling Memory Exhaustion Guest-to-Host DoS (XSA-253)	Nessus	Misc.	Local	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2018-5244

medium

Tenable Plugins

medium

medium

critical

medium