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UBUNTU-CVE-2020-11742 Moderate

UBUNTU-CVE-2020-11742

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of bad continuation handling in GNTTABOP_copy. Grant table operations are expected to return 0 for success, and a negative number for errors. The fix for CVE-2017-12135 introduced a path through grant copy handling where success may be returned to the caller without any action taken. In particular, the status fields of individual operations are left uninitialised, and may result in errant behaviour in the caller of GNTTABOP_copy. A buggy or malicious guest can construct its grant table in such a way that, when a backend domain tries to copy a grant, it hits the incorrect exit path. This returns success to the caller without doing anything, which may cause crashes or other incorrect behaviour.

Exploit probability Not scored
Published April 14, 2020
Required by Not available
Last source change April 22, 2026

02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE

Affected packages

Ubuntu:16.04:LTS xen

12 explicit affected versions

Ubuntu:18.04:LTS xen

3 explicit affected versions

Ubuntu:20.04:LTS xen

6 explicit affected versions

03 / CONNECTIONS

Connected vulnerabilities

04 / EVIDENCE

Source records

Open Source Vulnerabilities UBUNTU-CVE-2020-11742

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of bad continuation handling in GNTTABOP_copy. Grant table operations are expected to return 0 for success, and a negative number for errors. The fix for CVE-2017-12135 introduced a path through grant copy handling where success may be returned to the caller without any action taken. In particular, the status fields of individual operations are left uninitialised, and may result in errant behaviour in the caller of GNTTABOP_copy. A buggy or malicious guest can construct its grant table in such a way that, when a backend domain tries to copy a grant, it hits the incorrect exit path. This returns success to the caller without doing anything, which may cause crashes or other incorrect behaviour.

View original source

05 / REFERENCES

Further evidence