CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-14678 — An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.11, as used in Xen through 4.11.x

High CVSS 7.8

An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel through 4.17.11, as used in Xen through 4.11.x. The xen_failsafe_callback entry point in arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S does not properly maintain RBX, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (uninitialized memory usage and system crash). Within Xen, 64-bit x86 PV Linux guest OS users can trigger a guest OS crash or possibly gain privileges.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2018-07-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
linux/kernel
Weaknesses
CWE-665

Affected products

  • linux / linux_kernel
  • xen / xen
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 14.04
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04

Showing 6 representative product identities from 8 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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