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CVE-2021-28689

Published: 11 June 2021

x86: Speculative vulnerabilities with bare (non-shim) 32-bit PV guests 32-bit x86 PV guest kernels run in ring 1. At the time when Xen was developed, this area of the i386 architecture was rarely used, which is why Xen was able to use it to implement paravirtualisation, Xen's novel approach to virtualization. In AMD64, Xen had to use a different implementation approach, so Xen does not use ring 1 to support 64-bit guests. With the focus now being on 64-bit systems, and the availability of explicit hardware support for virtualization, fixing speculation issues in ring 1 is not a priority for processor companies. Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) is an architectural x86 extension put together to combat speculative execution sidechannel attacks, including Spectre v2. It was retrofitted in microcode to existing CPUs. For more details on Spectre v2, see: http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-254.html However, IBRS does not architecturally protect ring 0 from predictions learnt in ring 1. For more details, see: https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/deep-dives/deep-dive-indirect-branch-restricted-speculation Similar situations may exist with other mitigations for other kinds of speculative execution attacks. The situation is quite likely to be similar for speculative execution attacks which have yet to be discovered, disclosed, or mitigated.

Notes

AuthorNote
mdeslaur
hypervisor packages are in universe. For
issues in the hypervisor, add appropriate
tags to each section, ex:
Tags_xen: universe-binary

Priority

Low

Cvss 3 Severity Score

5.5

Score breakdown

Status

Package Release Status
xen
Launchpad, Ubuntu, Debian
impish Ignored
(end of life)
jammy Needs triage

kinetic Ignored
(end of life, was needs-triage)
bionic Needs triage

focal Needs triage

groovy Ignored
(end of life)
trusty Does not exist

upstream Needs triage

xenial Needs triage

hirsute Ignored
(end of life)
mantic Needs triage

lunar Ignored
(end of life, was needs-triage)
Binaries built from this source package are in Universe and so are supported by the community.

Severity score breakdown

Parameter Value
Base score 5.5
Attack vector Local
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required Low
User interaction None
Scope Unchanged
Confidentiality High
Integrity impact None
Availability impact None
Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N