CVE-2019-18422

high-risk
Published 2019-10-31

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing ARM guest OS users to cause a denial of service or gain privileges by leveraging the erroneous enabling of interrupts. Interrupts are unconditionally unmasked in exception handlers. When an exception occurs on an ARM system which is handled without changing processor level, some interrupts are unconditionally enabled during exception entry. So exceptions which occur when interrupts are masked will effectively unmask the interrupts. A malicious guest might contrive to arrange for critical Xen code to run with interrupts erroneously enabled. This could lead to data corruption, denial of service, or possibly even privilege escalation. However a precise attack technique has not been identified.

Do I need to act?

~
3.5% chance of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS score — moderate exploit probability
-
Not on CISA KEV list
No confirmed active exploitation reported to CISA
?
Patch status unknown
Check vendor advisories for fix availability and mitigation guidance
8
CVSS 8.8/10 High
NETWORK / LOW complexity

Affected Vendors

50
/ 100
high-risk
Severity 30/34 · Critical
Exploitability 7/34 · Low
Exposure 13/34 · Low