CVE-2023-46842

Xen vulnerability

CVSS

6.5

EPSS

8.5%

EPSS pct

94th

Exploited

No known

Unlike 32-bit PV guests, HVM guests may switch freely between 64-bit and other modes. This in particular means that they may set registers used to pass 32-bit-mode hypercall arguments to values outside of the range 32-bit code would be able to set them to. When processing of hypercalls takes a considerable amount of time, the hypervisor may choose to invoke a hypercall continuation. Doing so involves putting (perhaps updated) hypercall arguments in respective registers. For guests not running in 64-bit mode this further involves a certain amount of translation of the values. Unfortunately internal sanity checking of these translated values assumes high halves of registers to always be clear when invoking a hypercall. When this is found not to be the case, it triggers a consistency check in the hypervisor and causes a crash.

Affected vendor

Xen

Affected product

Xen

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

Weakness type (CWE)

CWE-843 — Type Confusion

Published

2024-05-16

Risk analysis

Based on its CVSS vector, this vulnerability is exploitable with local access, low attack complexity, requiring low privileges, no user interaction. Successful exploitation leads to high impact to availability.

Its EPSS score of 8.5% reflects a lower probability of exploitation activity in the wild over the next 30 days, placing it above 94% of all scored CVEs.

Check your external exposure to CVE-2023-46842

Confirm whether Xen Xen is running on any internet-facing host or subdomain.
Match discovered service fingerprints against the version affected by CVE-2023-46842.
Prioritise remediation if the asset is public, business-critical, or near authentication/payment flows.

How ThreatPort helps with CVE-2023-46842

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