CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2020-25601 — An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. There is a lack of preemption in evtchn_reset() / evtchn_destroy(). In particular, the FIFO event channel model allows guests to have a large number of event channels active at a time. Closing all of these (when resetting all event channels or when cleaning up after the guest) may take extended periods of time. So far, there was no arrangement for preemption at suitable intervals, allowing a CPU to spend an almost unbounded amount of time in the processing of these operations. Malicious or buggy guest kernels can mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack affecting the entire system. All Xen versions are vulnerable in principle. Whether versions 4.3 and older are vulnerable depends on underlying hardware characteristics.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2020-09-23
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- operating-system
Affected products
- xen / xen
- debian / debian_linux / 10.0
- fedoraproject / fedora / 31
- fedoraproject / fedora / 32
- fedoraproject / fedora / 33
- opensuse / leap / 15.2
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
The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.