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Alpine Linux: CVE-2023-46836: Vulnerability in Xen

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Alpine Linux: CVE-2023-46836: Vulnerability in Xen

Severity
4
CVSS
(AV:L/AC:M/Au:S/C:C/I:N/A:N)
Published
01/05/2024
Created
04/09/2024
Added
03/26/2024
Modified
04/09/2024

Description

The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled. However, the original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown (XPTI) deliberately left interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active. As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.

Solution(s)

  • alpine-linux-upgrade-xen

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