Unity Linux 20.1070e Security Update: kernel (UTSA-2025-987266)

high Nessus Plugin ID 267958

Synopsis

The Unity Linux host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

The Unity Linux 20 host has a package installed that is affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the UTSA-2025-987266 advisory.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

kvm: avoid speculation-based attacks from out-of-range memslot accesses

KVM's mechanism for accessing guest memory translates a guest physical address (gpa) to a host virtual address using the right-shifted gpa (also known as gfn) and a struct kvm_memory_slot. The translation is performed in __gfn_to_hva_memslot using the following formula:

hva = slot->userspace_addr + (gfn - slot->base_gfn) * PAGE_SIZE

It is expected that gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory. However, a guest can access invalid physical addresses in such a way that the gfn is invalid.

__gfn_to_hva_memslot is called from kvm_vcpu_gfn_to_hva_prot, which first retrieves a memslot through __gfn_to_memslot. While __gfn_to_memslot does check that the gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory or not, a CPU can speculate the result of the check and continue execution speculatively using an illegal gfn. The speculation can result in calculating an out-of-bounds hva. If the resulting host virtual address is used to load another guest physical address, this is effectively a Spectre gadget consisting of two consecutive reads, the second of which is data dependent on the first.

Right now it's not clear if there are any cases in which this is exploitable. One interesting case was reported by the original author of this patch, and involves visiting guest page tables on x86. Right now these are not vulnerable because the hva read goes through get_user(), which contains an LFENCE speculation barrier. However, there are patches in progress for x86 uaccess.h to mask kernel addresses instead of using LFENCE; once these land, a guest could use speculation to read from the VMM's ring 3 address space. Other architectures such as ARM already use the address masking method, and would be susceptible to this same kind of data-dependent access gadgets. Therefore, this patch proactively protects from these attacks by masking out-of-bounds gfns in __gfn_to_hva_memslot, which blocks speculation of invalid hvas.

Sean Christopherson noted that this patch does not cover kvm_read_guest_offset_cached. This however is limited to a few bytes past the end of the cache, and therefore it is unlikely to be useful in the context of building a chain of data dependent accesses.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Unity Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 267958

File Name: unity_linux_UTSA-2025-987266.nasl

Version: 1.1

Type: local

Family: Unity Linux Local Security Checks

Published: 10/7/2025

Updated: 10/7/2025

Supported Sensors: Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.0

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.2

Temporal Score: 4.6

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2021-47277

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.1

Temporal Score: 6.2

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

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

Vulnerability Information

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

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 9/23/2025

Vulnerability Publication Date: 1/28/2022

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2021-47277

Detections

Analytics