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RHEL 5 : xen (Unpatched Vulnerability)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 196575

Synopsis

The remote Red Hat 5 host is affected by multiple vulnerabilities that will not be patched.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has one or more packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities that have been acknowledged by the vendor but will not be patched.

 - xen: missing descriptor table limit checking in x86 PV emulation leading to privilege escalation (CVE-2019-18425)

 - Xen through 4.8.x allows local 64-bit x86 HVM guest OS users to gain privileges by leveraging mishandling of SYSCALL singlestep during emulation. (CVE-2016-10013)

 - The paging_invlpg function in include/asm-x86/paging.h in Xen 3.3.x through 4.6.x, when using shadow mode paging or nested virtualization is enabled, allows local HVM guest users to cause a denial of service (host crash) via a non-canonical guest address in an INVVPID instruction, which triggers a hypervisor bug check. (CVE-2016-1571)

 - The get_page_from_l3e function in arch/x86/mm.c in Xen allows local 32-bit PV guest OS administrators to gain host OS privileges via vectors related to L3 recursive pagetables. (CVE-2016-7092)

 - Xen 4.5.3, 4.6.3, and 4.7.x allow local HVM guest OS administrators to overwrite hypervisor memory and consequently gain host OS privileges by leveraging mishandling of instruction pointer truncation during emulation. (CVE-2016-7093)

 - Buffer overflow in Xen 4.7.x and earlier allows local x86 HVM guest OS administrators on guests running with shadow paging to cause a denial of service via a pagetable update. (CVE-2016-7094)

 - Xen PV guest before Xen 4.3 checked access permissions to MMIO ranges only after accessing them, allowing host PCI device space memory reads, leading to information disclosure. This is an error in the get_user function. NOTE: the upstream Xen Project considers versions before 4.5.x to be EOL. (CVE-2017-7995)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.10.x. Certain PV MMU operations may take a long time to process.
 For that reason Xen explicitly checks for the need to preempt the current vCPU at certain points. A few rarely taken code paths did bypass such checks. By suitably enforcing the conditions through its own page table contents, a malicious guest may cause such bypasses to be used for an unbounded number of iterations. A malicious or buggy PV guest may cause a Denial of Service (DoS) affecting the entire host.
 Specifically, it may prevent use of a physical CPU for an indeterminate period of time. All Xen versions from 3.4 onwards are vulnerable. Xen versions 3.3 and earlier are vulnerable to an even wider class of attacks, due to them lacking preemption checks altogether in the affected code paths. Only x86 systems are affected. ARM systems are not affected. Only multi-vCPU x86 PV guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 HVM or PVH guests as well as x86 single-vCPU PV ones cannot leverage the vulnerability. (CVE-2018-12891)

 - An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.11, as used in Xen through 4.11.x. The xen_failsafe_callback entry point in arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S does not properly maintain RBX, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (uninitialized memory usage and system crash). Within Xen, 64-bit x86 PV Linux guest OS users can trigger a guest OS crash or possibly gain privileges.
 (CVE-2018-14678)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x on AMD x86 platforms, possibly allowing guest OS users to gain host OS privileges because TLB flushes do not always occur after IOMMU mapping changes.
 (CVE-2018-19961)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x on AMD x86 platforms, possibly allowing guest OS users to gain host OS privileges because small IOMMU mappings are unsafely combined into larger ones.
 (CVE-2018-19962)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x allowing x86 guest OS users to cause a denial of service or gain privileges because grant-table transfer requests are mishandled. (CVE-2019-17340)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service or gain privileges by leveraging a page-writability race condition during addition of a passed-through PCI device. (CVE-2019-17341)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service or gain privileges by leveraging a race condition that arose when XENMEM_exchange was introduced.
 (CVE-2019-17342)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service or gain privileges by leveraging incorrect use of the HVM physmap concept for PV domains. (CVE-2019-17343)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service by leveraging a long-running operation that exists to support restartability of PTE updates.
 (CVE-2019-17344)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service or gain privileges because of an incompatibility between Process Context Identifiers (PCID) and TLB flushes. (CVE-2019-17346)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of an incompatibility between Process Context Identifiers (PCID) and shadow-pagetable switching.
 (CVE-2019-17348)

 - An issue was discovered in drivers/xen/balloon.c in the Linux kernel before 5.2.3, as used in Xen through 4.12.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of unrestricted resource consumption during the mapping of guest memory, aka CID-6ef36ab967c7. (CVE-2019-17351)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to gain host OS privileges by leveraging race conditions in pagetable promotion and demotion operations. There are issues with restartable PV type change operations. To avoid using shadow pagetables for PV guests, Xen exposes the actual hardware pagetables to the guest. In order to prevent the guest from modifying these page tables directly, Xen keeps track of how pages are used using a type system; pages must be promoted before being used as a pagetable, and demoted before being used for any other type. Xen also allows for recursive promotions: i.e., an operating system promoting a page to an L4 pagetable may end up causing pages to be promoted to L3s, which may in turn cause pages to be promoted to L2s, and so on. These operations may take an arbitrarily large amount of time, and so must be re-startable. Unfortunately, making recursive pagetable promotion and demotion operations restartable is incredibly complicated, and the code contains several races which, if triggered, can cause Xen to drop or retain extra type counts, potentially allowing guests to get write access to in-use pagetables. A malicious PV guest administrator may be able to escalate their privilege to that of the host. All x86 systems with untrusted PV guests are vulnerable. HVM and PVH guests cannot exercise this vulnerability. (CVE-2019-18421)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing attackers to gain host OS privileges via DMA in a situation where an untrusted domain has access to a physical device. This occurs because passed through PCI devices may corrupt host memory after deassignment. When a PCI device is assigned to an untrusted domain, it is possible for that domain to program the device to DMA to an arbitrary address. The IOMMU is used to protect the host from malicious DMA by making sure that the device addresses can only target memory assigned to the guest. However, when the guest domain is torn down, or the device is deassigned, the device is assigned back to dom0, thus allowing any in-flight DMA to potentially target critical host data. An untrusted domain with access to a physical device can DMA into host memory, leading to privilege escalation. Only systems where guests are given direct access to physical devices capable of DMA (PCI pass-through) are vulnerable. Systems which do not use PCI pass-through are not vulnerable.
 (CVE-2019-18424)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 AMD HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service or possibly gain privileges by triggering data-structure access during pagetable-height updates.
 When running on AMD systems with an IOMMU, Xen attempted to dynamically adapt the number of levels of pagetables (the pagetable height) in the IOMMU according to the guest's address space size. The code to select and update the height had several bugs. Notably, the update was done without taking a lock which is necessary for safe operation. A malicious guest administrator can cause Xen to access data structures while they are being modified, causing Xen to crash. Privilege escalation is thought to be very difficult but cannot be ruled out. Additionally, there is a potential memory leak of 4kb per guest boot, under memory pressure. Only Xen on AMD CPUs is vulnerable. Xen running on Intel CPUs is not vulnerable. ARM systems are not vulnerable. Only systems where guests are given direct access to physical devices are vulnerable. Systems which do not use PCI pass-through are not vulnerable. Only HVM guests can exploit the vulnerability. PV and PVH guests cannot. All versions of Xen with IOMMU support are vulnerable.
 (CVE-2019-19577)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service via degenerate chains of linear pagetables, because of an incorrect fix for CVE-2017-15595. Linear pagetables is a technique which involves either pointing a pagetable at itself, or to another pagetable of the same or higher level. Xen has limited support for linear pagetables: A page may either point to itself, or point to another pagetable of the same level (i.e., L2 to L2, L3 to L3, and so on). XSA-240 introduced an additional restriction that limited the depth of such chains by allowing pages to either
 *point to* other pages of the same level, or *be pointed to* by other pages of the same level, but not both. To implement this, we keep track of the number of outstanding times a page points to or is pointed to another page table, to prevent both from happening at the same time. Unfortunately, the original commit introducing this reset this count when resuming validation of a partially-validated pagetable, incorrectly dropping some linear_pt_entry counts. If an attacker could engineer such a situation to occur, they might be able to make loops or other arbitrary chains of linear pagetables, as described in XSA-240. A malicious or buggy PV guest may cause the hypervisor to crash, resulting in Denial of Service (DoS) affecting the entire host. Privilege escalation and information leaks cannot be excluded. All versions of Xen are vulnerable. Only x86 systems are affected. Arm systems are not affected. Only x86 PV guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 HVM and PVH guests cannot leverage the vulnerability. Only systems which have enabled linear pagetables are vulnerable. Systems which have disabled linear pagetables, either by selecting CONFIG_PV_LINEAR_PT=n when building the hypervisor, or adding pv-linear-pt=false on the command- line, are not vulnerable. (CVE-2019-19578)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing attackers to gain host OS privileges via DMA in a situation where an untrusted domain has access to a physical device (and assignable-add is not used), because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2019-18424. XSA-302 relies on the use of libxl's assignable-add feature to prepare devices to be assigned to untrusted guests. Unfortunately, this is not considered a strictly required step for device assignment. The PCI passthrough documentation on the wiki describes alternate ways of preparing devices for assignment, and libvirt uses its own ways as well. Hosts where these alternate methods are used will still leave the system in a vulnerable state after the device comes back from a guest. An untrusted domain with access to a physical device can DMA into host memory, leading to privilege escalation. Only systems where guests are given direct access to physical devices capable of DMA (PCI pass-through) are vulnerable. Systems which do not use PCI pass-through are not vulnerable. (CVE-2019-19579)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to gain host OS privileges by leveraging race conditions in pagetable promotion and demotion operations, because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2019-18421. XSA-299 addressed several critical issues in restartable PV type change operations.
 Despite extensive testing and auditing, some corner cases were missed. A malicious PV guest administrator may be able to escalate their privilege to that of the host. All security-supported versions of Xen are vulnerable. Only x86 systems are affected. Arm systems are not affected. Only x86 PV guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 HVM and PVH guests cannot leverage the vulnerability. Note that these attacks require very precise timing, which may be difficult to exploit in practice. (CVE-2019-19580)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 guest OS users to cause a denial of service (infinite loop) because certain bit iteration is mishandled. In a number of places bitmaps are being used by the hypervisor to track certain state. Iteration over all bits involves functions which may misbehave in certain corner cases: On x86 accesses to bitmaps with a compile time known size of 64 may incur undefined behavior, which may in particular result in infinite loops. A malicious guest may cause a hypervisor crash or hang, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS). All versions of Xen are vulnerable. x86 systems with 64 or more nodes are vulnerable (there might not be any such systems that Xen would run on).
 x86 systems with less than 64 nodes are not vulnerable. (CVE-2019-19582)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 HVM/PVH guest OS users to cause a denial of service (guest OS crash) because VMX VMEntry checks mishandle a certain case. Please see XSA-260 for background on the MovSS shadow. Please see XSA-156 for background on the need for #DB interception. The VMX VMEntry checks do not like the exact combination of state which occurs when #DB in intercepted, Single Stepping is active, and blocked by STI/MovSS is active, despite this being a legitimate state to be in.
 The resulting VMEntry failure is fatal to the guest. HVM/PVH guest userspace code may be able to crash the guest, resulting in a guest Denial of Service. All versions of Xen are affected. Only systems supporting VMX hardware virtual extensions (Intel, Cyrix, or Zhaoxin CPUs) are affected. Arm and AMD systems are unaffected. Only HVM/PVH guests are affected. PV guests cannot leverage the vulnerability.
 (CVE-2019-19583)

 - An issue was discovered in xenoprof in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users (without active profiling) to obtain sensitive information about other guests. Unprivileged guests can request to map xenoprof buffers, even if profiling has not been enabled for those guests. These buffers were not scrubbed. (CVE-2020-11740)

 - An issue was discovered in xenoprof in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users (with active profiling) to obtain sensitive information about other guests, cause a denial of service, or possibly gain privileges. For guests for which active profiling was enabled by the administrator, the xenoprof code uses the standard Xen shared ring structure. Unfortunately, this code did not treat the guest as a potential adversary: it trusts the guest not to modify buffer size information or modify head / tail pointers in unexpected ways. This can crash the host (DoS). Privilege escalation cannot be ruled out.
 (CVE-2020-11741)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of bad continuation handling in GNTTABOP_copy. Grant table operations are expected to return 0 for success, and a negative number for errors. The fix for CVE-2017-12135 introduced a path through grant copy handling where success may be returned to the caller without any action taken. In particular, the status fields of individual operations are left uninitialised, and may result in errant behaviour in the caller of GNTTABOP_copy. A buggy or malicious guest can construct its grant table in such a way that, when a backend domain tries to copy a grant, it hits the incorrect exit path. This returns success to the caller without doing anything, which may cause crashes or other incorrect behaviour. (CVE-2020-11742)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing x86 Intel HVM guest OS users to cause a host OS denial of service or possibly gain privileges because of insufficient cache write-back under VT-d. When page tables are shared between IOMMU and CPU, changes to them require flushing of both TLBs. Furthermore, IOMMUs may be non-coherent, and hence prior to flushing IOMMU TLBs, a CPU cache also needs writing back to memory after changes were made. Such writing back of cached data was missing in particular when splitting large page mappings into smaller granularity ones. A malicious guest may be able to retain read/write DMA access to frames returned to Xen's free pool, and later reused for another purpose. Host crashes (leading to a Denial of Service) and privilege escalation cannot be ruled out. Xen versions from at least 3.2 onwards are affected. Only x86 Intel systems are affected. x86 AMD as well as Arm systems are not affected. Only x86 HVM guests using hardware assisted paging (HAP), having a passed through PCI device assigned, and having page table sharing enabled can leverage the vulnerability. Note that page table sharing will be enabled (by default) only if Xen considers IOMMU and CPU large page size support compatible. (CVE-2020-15565)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. The PCI passthrough code improperly uses register data.
 Code paths in Xen's MSI handling have been identified that act on unsanitized values read back from device hardware registers. While devices strictly compliant with PCI specifications shouldn't be able to affect these registers, experience shows that it's very common for devices to have out-of-spec backdoor operations that can affect the result of these reads. A not fully trusted guest may be able to crash Xen, leading to a Denial of Service (DoS) for the entire system. Privilege escalation and information leaks cannot be excluded. All versions of Xen supporting PCI passthrough are affected. Only x86 systems are vulnerable. Arm systems are not vulnerable. Only guests with passed through PCI devices may be able to leverage the vulnerability. Only systems passing through devices with out-of-spec (backdoor) functionality can cause issues. Experience shows that such out-of-spec functionality is common; unless you have reason to believe that your device does not have such functionality, it's better to assume that it does. (CVE-2020-25595)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There is a lack of preemption in evtchn_reset() / evtchn_destroy(). In particular, the FIFO event channel model allows guests to have a large number of event channels active at a time. Closing all of these (when resetting all event channels or when cleaning up after the guest) may take extended periods of time. So far, there was no arrangement for preemption at suitable intervals, allowing a CPU to spend an almost unbounded amount of time in the processing of these operations. Malicious or buggy guest kernels can mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack affecting the entire system. All Xen versions are vulnerable in principle. Whether versions 4.3 and older are vulnerable depends on underlying hardware characteristics. (CVE-2020-25601)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There are missing memory barriers when accessing/allocating an event channel. Event channels control structures can be accessed lockless as long as the port is considered to be valid. Such a sequence is missing an appropriate memory barrier (e.g., smp_*mb()) to prevent both the compiler and CPU from re-ordering access. A malicious guest may be able to cause a hypervisor crash resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS). Information leak and privilege escalation cannot be excluded. Systems running all versions of Xen are affected. Whether a system is vulnerable will depend on the CPU and compiler used to build Xen. For all systems, the presence and the scope of the vulnerability depend on the precise re-ordering performed by the compiler used to build Xen. We have not been able to survey compilers; consequently we cannot say which compiler(s) might produce vulnerable code (with which code generation options). GCC documentation clearly suggests that re-ordering is possible. Arm systems will also be vulnerable if the CPU is able to re-order memory access. Please consult your CPU vendor. x86 systems are only vulnerable if a compiler performs re-ordering. (CVE-2020-25603)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There is a race condition when migrating timers between x86 HVM vCPUs. When migrating timers of x86 HVM guests between its vCPUs, the locking model used allows for a second vCPU of the same guest (also operating on the timers) to release a lock that it didn't acquire. The most likely effect of the issue is a hang or crash of the hypervisor, i.e., a Denial of Service (DoS). All versions of Xen are affected. Only x86 systems are vulnerable. Arm systems are not vulnerable. Only x86 HVM guests can leverage the vulnerability. x86 PV and PVH cannot leverage the vulnerability. Only guests with more than one vCPU can exploit the vulnerability. (CVE-2020-25604)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x allowing x86 guest OS users to cause a denial of service (data corruption), cause a data leak, or possibly gain privileges because an AMD IOMMU page-table entry can be half-updated. (CVE-2020-27670)

 - An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to gain guest OS privileges by modifying kernel memory contents, because invalidation of TLB entries is mishandled during use of an INVLPG-like attack technique. (CVE-2020-27674)

 - Xen through 4.14.x allows guest OS administrators to obtain sensitive information (such as AES keys from outside the guest) via a side-channel attack on a power/energy monitoring interface, aka a Platypus attack. NOTE: there is only one logically independent fix: to change the access control for each such interface in Xen. (CVE-2020-28368)

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied on the package manager's report that the package is installed.

Solution

The vendor has acknowledged the vulnerabilities but no solution has been provided. Refer to the vendor for remediation guidance.

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 196575

File Name: redhat_unpatched-xen-rhel5.nasl

Version: 1.0

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 5/11/2024

Updated: 5/11/2024

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: High

Score: 7.3

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 9.3

Temporal Score: 6.9

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2019-18425

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 9.8

Temporal Score: 8.5

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

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-xen, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Vulnerability Publication Date: 1/20/2016

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2016-10013, CVE-2016-1571, CVE-2016-7092, CVE-2016-7093, CVE-2016-7094, CVE-2017-7995, CVE-2018-12891, CVE-2018-14678, CVE-2018-19961, CVE-2018-19962, CVE-2019-17340, CVE-2019-17341, CVE-2019-17342, CVE-2019-17343, CVE-2019-17344, CVE-2019-17346, CVE-2019-17348, CVE-2019-17351, CVE-2019-18421, CVE-2019-18424, CVE-2019-18425, CVE-2019-19577, CVE-2019-19578, CVE-2019-19579, CVE-2019-19580, CVE-2019-19582, CVE-2019-19583, CVE-2020-11740, CVE-2020-11741, CVE-2020-11742, CVE-2020-15565, CVE-2020-25595, CVE-2020-25601, CVE-2020-25603, CVE-2020-25604, CVE-2020-27670, CVE-2020-27674, CVE-2020-28368