CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-18420 — An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service via a VCPUOP_initialise hypercall

Medium CVSS 6.5

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.12.x allowing x86 PV guest OS users to cause a denial of service via a VCPUOP_initialise hypercall. hypercall_create_continuation() is a variadic function which uses a printf-like format string to interpret its parameters. Error handling for a bad format character was done using BUG(), which crashes Xen. One path, via the VCPUOP_initialise hypercall, has a bad format character. The BUG() can be hit if VCPUOP_initialise executes for a sufficiently long period of time for a continuation to be created. Malicious guests may cause a hypervisor crash, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS). Xen versions 4.6 and newer are vulnerable. Xen versions 4.5 and earlier are not vulnerable. Only x86 PV guests can exploit the vulnerability. HVM and PVH guests, and guests on ARM systems, cannot exploit the vulnerability.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2019-10-31
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-134

Affected products

  • xen / xen
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 29
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 30
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 31

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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