Home/CVE/The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was
CVE

CVE-2023-46836

The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was

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.

MEDIUM · CVSS 4.7 EPSS 0.00021
Monitor
  • No active-exploitation, high-EPSS, or public-exploit signals - routine patching cadence
Sigma rules0 YARA rules0

Affected Products & Versions

1
xenall versions

Scoring & Timeline

4.7
MEDIUM · CVSS v3.1 · security@xen.org
View on NVD
Attack Vector
Network Adjacent Local Physical
Attack Complexity
Low High
Privileges Required
None Low High
User Interaction
None Required
Scope
Unchanged Changed
Confidentiality
None Low High
Integrity
None Low High
Availability
None Low High
Published to NVD05 Jan 2024 · 05:15 PM
CVSS VectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
SSVC triage · cisa-vulnrichment
Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
SSVC asks the questions that actually drive patch urgency: is it being exploited, can attacks be automated, and how total is the impact.

Vendor Advisories

8
suse-csafopenSUSE-SU-2024:13442-1
suse-csafSUSE-SU-2023:4945-1
suse-csafSUSE-SU-2023:4484-1
suse-csafSUSE-SU-2023:4485-1
suse-csafSUSE-SU-2023:4486-1
🔗

References & Sources

2
Source URLs (vendor pages, mailing lists, write-ups). Exploit/PoC links are in their own section above to avoid duplication.
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