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Alpine: xen: security update to 4.17.2-r4

medium Tenable Cloud Security Plugin ID 408022

Description

There are packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities referenced in the following CVEs:

 - The current setup of the quarantine page tables assumes that the quarantine domain (dom_io) has been
 initialized with an address width of DEFAULT_DOMAIN_ADDRESS_WIDTH (48) and hence 4 page table levels.
 However dom_io being a PV domain gets the AMD-Vi IOMMU page tables levels based on the maximum (hot
 pluggable) RAM address, and hence on systems with no RAM above the 512GB mark only 3 page-table levels are
 configured in the IOMMU. On systems without RAM above the 512GB boundary amd_iommu_quarantine_init() will
 setup page tables for the scratch page with 4 levels, while the IOMMU will be configured to use 3 levels
 only, resulting in the last page table directory (PDE) effectively becoming a page table entry (PTE), and
 hence a device in quarantine mode gaining write access to the page destined to be a PDE. Due to this page
 table level mismatch, the sink page the device gets read/write access to is no longer cleared between
 device assignment, possibly leading to data leaks. (CVE-2023-46835)

 - The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-
 safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled. However, the
 original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown (XPTI) deliberately left interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one
 unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active. As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect
 different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race
 condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack
 against Xen. (CVE-2023-46836)

See Also

https://security.alpinelinux.org/vuln/CVE-2023-46835

https://security.alpinelinux.org/vuln/CVE-2023-46836

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 408022

Version: Revision 1.21

Type: Local

Published: 11/15/2023

Updated: 12/19/2025

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3

Percentile: 23.51

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.6

Temporal Score: 3.4

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:C/I:N/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2023-46835

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.5

Temporal Score: 4.8

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Vulnerability Publication Date: 11/15/2023

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2023-46835, CVE-2023-46836

IAVB: 2023-B-0090-S