CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-11741 — Xen Xen security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.8

An issue was discovered in xenoprof in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users (with active profiling) to obtain sensitive information about other guests, cause a denial of service, or possibly gain privileges. For guests for which "active" profiling was enabled by the administrator, the xenoprof code uses the standard Xen shared ring structure. Unfortunately, this code did not treat the guest as a potential adversary: it trusts the guest not to modify buffer size information or modify head / tail pointers in unexpected ways. This can crash the host (DoS). Privilege escalation cannot be ruled out.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.8 (3.1)
Published
2020-04-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-909

Affected products

  • xen / xen
  • xen / xen / 4.13.0
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 30
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 31
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 32
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0

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

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

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

Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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