CVE-2018-12893

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.10.x. One of the fixes in XSA-260 added some safety checks to help prevent Xen livelocking with debug exceptions. Unfortunately, due to an oversight, at least one of these safety checks can be triggered by a guest. A malicious PV guest can crash Xen, leading to a Denial of Service. All Xen systems which have applied the XSA-260 fix are vulnerable. Only x86 systems are vulnerable. ARM systems are not vulnerable. Only x86 PV guests can exploit the vulnerability. x86 HVM and PVH guests cannot exploit the vulnerability. An attacker needs to be able to control hardware debugging facilities to exploit the vulnerability, but such permissions are typically available to unprivileged users.

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/06/27/11Mailing List, Mitigation, Patch, Third Party Advisory
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/104572Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041202Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
• http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-265.htmlMitigation, Patch, Vendor Advisory
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1590979Issue Tracking, Mitigation, Third Party Advisory
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/11/msg00013.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201810-06
• https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX235748Vendor Advisory
• https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4236Third Party Advisory
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/06/27/11Mailing List, Mitigation, Patch, Third Party Advisory
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/104572Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041202Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
• http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-265.htmlMitigation, Patch, Vendor Advisory
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1590979Issue Tracking, Mitigation, Third Party Advisory
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/11/msg00013.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201810-06
• https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX235748Vendor Advisory
• https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4236Third Party Advisory

Published

Jul 2, 2018

Last Modified

Jun 17, 2026

Status

Modified