CVE-2021-28704 - CVE House
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Status published High CVE-2021-28704

PoD operations on misaligned GFNs T[his CNA information record relates...

Vulnerability Description

PoD operations on misaligned GFNs T[his CNA information record relates to multiple CVEs; the text explains which aspects/vulnerabilities correspond to which CVE.] x86 HVM and PVH guests may be started in populate-on-demand (PoD) mode, to provide a way for them to later easily have more memory assigned. Guests are permitted to control certain P2M aspects of individual pages via hypercalls. These hypercalls may act on ranges of pages specified via page orders (resulting in a power-of-2 number of pages). The implementation of some of these hypercalls for PoD does not enforce the base page frame number to be suitably aligned for the specified order, yet some code involved in PoD handling actually makes such an assumption. These operations are XENMEM_decrease_reservation (CVE-2021-28704) and XENMEM_populate_physmap (CVE-2021-28707), the latter usable only by domains controlling the guest, i.e. a de-privileged qemu or a stub domain. (Patch 1, combining the fix to both these two issues.) In addition handling of XENMEM_decrease_reservation can also trigger a host crash when the specified page order is neither 4k nor 2M nor 1G (CVE-2021-28708, patch 2).

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

The following person or organization is credited with identifying this vulnerability, as recorded in the NVD database:

  • {'credit_data': {'description': {'description_data': [{'lang': 'eng', 'value': 'This issue was discovered by Jan Beulich of SUSE.'}]}}}

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

xen
Vulnerable Versions:
xen-unstable, unspecified, 4.12.x, next of 4.14.x, 4.15.x

Timeline

Official Publish: November 24th, 2021
Last Modified: August 3rd, 2024
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Weaknesses (CWE)

No CWE data available

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

No associated TTPs found for this vulnerability.