CVE-2018-12893

Description

From CVE.org

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.10.x. One of the fixes in XSA-260 added some safety checks to help prevent Xen livelocking with debug exceptions. Unfortunately, due to an oversight, at least one of these safety checks can be triggered by a guest. A malicious PV guest can crash Xen, leading to a Denial of Service. All Xen systems which have applied the XSA-260 fix are vulnerable. Only x86 systems are vulnerable. ARM systems are not vulnerable. Only x86 PV guests can exploit the vulnerability. x86 HVM and PVH guests cannot exploit the vulnerability. An attacker needs to be able to control hardware debugging facilities to exploit the vulnerability, but such permissions are typically available to unprivileged users.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score6.56.5N/A
Attack VectorLocalLocalN/A
Attack ComplexityLowLowN/A
Privileges RequiredLowLowN/A
User InteractionNoneNoneN/A
ScopeChangedChangedN/A
ConfidentialityNoneNoneN/A
Integrity ImpactNoneNoneN/A
Availability ImpactHighHighN/A

Vector

Red Hat: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

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

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Access Control

Technical Impact: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity

A user can access restricted functionality and/or sensitive information that may include administrative functionality and user accounts.

Acknowledgements

Red Hat would like to thank the Xen project for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Andrew Cooper (Citrix) as the original reporter.

Frequently Asked Questions

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