CVE-2020-25601

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.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
xen	24.04 LTS noble	Not affected
	23.10 mantic	Not affected
	23.04 lunar	Not affected
	22.10 kinetic	Not affected
	22.04 LTS jammy	Not affected
	21.10 impish	Ignored
	21.04 hirsute	Ignored
	20.10 groovy	Ignored
	20.04 LTS focal	Fixed 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3
	18.04 LTS bionic	Vulnerable
	16.04 LTS xenial	Vulnerable
	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	5.5 · Medium
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	Low
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

USN-5617-1
Xen vulnerabilities
19 September 2022