CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-28703 — Xen Xen security vulnerability

High CVSS 7

grant table v2 status pages may remain accessible after de-allocation (take two) Guest get permitted access to certain Xen-owned pages of memory. The majority of such pages remain allocated / associated with a guest for its entire lifetime. Grant table v2 status pages, however, get de-allocated when a guest switched (back) from v2 to v1. The freeing of such pages requires that the hypervisor know where in the guest these pages were mapped. The hypervisor tracks only one use within guest space, but racing requests from the guest to insert mappings of these pages may result in any of them to become mapped in multiple locations. Upon switching back from v2 to v1, the guest would then retain access to a page that was freed and perhaps re-used for other purposes. This bug was fortuitously fixed by code cleanup in Xen 4.14, and backported to security-supported Xen branches as a prerequisite of the fix for XSA-378.

Severity
High
CVSS
7 (3.1)
Published
2021-12-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system

Affected products

  • xen / xen

Matched remediation archetype

General vulnerability remediation

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

Check exposure

  • Confirm the affected component, deployment paths, reachable interfaces, and enabled features from inventories and configuration, without probing production destructively.
  • Compare the advisory's affected conditions with the repository lockfiles, build manifests, artifacts, and runtime inventory.
  • Identify data sensitivity, trust boundaries, and privilege level for every confirmed affected deployment.

Remediate safely

  • Apply a vendor-supported fix or remove the affected component or feature; record the selected change and its source in the repository.
  • Update direct and transitive dependency locks, generated artifacts, deployment manifests, and asset inventories together.
  • Add a regression test for the documented unsafe condition using inert inputs and preserve rollback instructions.

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.