Xen Hypervisor Page Type Reference Handling Memory Exhaustion Guest-to-Host DoS (XSA-242)
Medium Nessus Plugin ID 103977
Synopsis
The remote Xen hypervisor installation is missing a security update.
Description
According to its self-reported version number, the Xen hypervisor installed on the remote host is affected by an unspecified flaw in arch/x86/mm.c that is triggered as page type references are not properly handled when performing certain cleanup operations. This allows an attacker on the guest to consume excessive memory, resulting in a denial of service for the host.
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.
Solution
Apply the appropriate patch according to the vendor advisory.