Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting xen package, versions [4.8.0,4.12.2)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.05% (24th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-XEN-2383853
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed11 Dec 2019
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 11 Dec 2019

CVE-2019-19582  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-835  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade xen to version 4.12.2 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 guest OS users to cause a denial of service (infinite loop) because certain bit iteration is mishandled. In a number of places bitmaps are being used by the hypervisor to track certain state. Iteration over all bits involves functions which may misbehave in certain corner cases: On x86 accesses to bitmaps with a compile time known size of 64 may incur undefined behavior, which may in particular result in infinite loops. A malicious guest may cause a hypervisor crash or hang, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS). All versions of Xen are vulnerable. x86 systems with 64 or more nodes are vulnerable (there might not be any such systems that Xen would run on). x86 systems with less than 64 nodes are not vulnerable.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

References

CVSS Scores

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