Vulnerability CVE-2023-46842


Published: 2024-05-16

Description:
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.

 References:
https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-454.html

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