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.
References
Link Resource
https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-446.html Patch Vendor Advisory
History

No history.

cve-icon MITRE Information

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: XEN

Published: 2024-01-05T16:34:59.036Z

Updated: 2024-01-05T16:34:59.036Z

Reserved: 2023-10-27T07:55:35.332Z


Link: CVE-2023-46836

JSON object: View

cve-icon NVD Information

Status : Analyzed

Published: 2024-01-05T17:15:11.197

Modified: 2024-01-11T17:09:02.020


Link: CVE-2023-46836

JSON object: View

cve-icon Redhat Information

No data.