CVE-2020-15563

Publication date 7 July 2020

Last updated 24 July 2024


Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

6.5 · Medium

Score breakdown

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing x86 HVM guest OS users to cause a hypervisor crash. An inverted conditional in x86 HVM guests' dirty video RAM tracking code allows such guests to make Xen de-reference a pointer guaranteed to point at unmapped space. A malicious or buggy HVM guest may cause the hypervisor to crash, resulting in Denial of Service (DoS) affecting the entire host. Xen versions from 4.8 onwards are affected. Xen versions 4.7 and earlier are not affected. Only x86 systems are affected. Arm systems are not affected. Only x86 HVM guests using shadow paging can leverage the vulnerability. In addition, there needs to be an entity actively monitoring a guest's video frame buffer (typically for display purposes) in order for such a guest to be able to leverage the vulnerability. x86 PV guests, as well as x86 HVM guests using hardware assisted paging (HAP), cannot leverage the vulnerability.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
xen 22.10 kinetic
Not affected
22.04 LTS jammy
Not affected
21.10 impish
Not affected
21.04 hirsute
Not affected
20.10 groovy
Not affected
20.04 LTS focal
Fixed 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
19.10 eoan Ignored end of life
18.04 LTS bionic
Not affected
16.04 LTS xenial
Not affected
14.04 LTS trusty Not in release

Notes


mdeslaur

hypervisor packages are in universe. For issues in the hypervisor, add appropriate tags to each section, ex: Tags_xen: universe-binary

Severity score breakdown

Parameter Value
Base score 6.5 · Medium
Attack vector Local
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required Low
User interaction None
Scope Changed
Confidentiality None
Integrity impact None
Availability impact High
Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H