CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-23033 — Xen Xen security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

arm: guest_physmap_remove_page not removing the p2m mappings The functions to remove one or more entries from a guest p2m pagetable on Arm (p2m_remove_mapping, guest_physmap_remove_page, and p2m_set_entry with mfn set to INVALID_MFN) do not actually clear the pagetable entry if the entry doesn't have the valid bit set. It is possible to have a valid pagetable entry without the valid bit set when a guest operating system uses set/way cache maintenance instructions. For instance, a guest issuing a set/way cache maintenance instruction, then calling the XENMEM_decrease_reservation hypercall to give back memory pages to Xen, might be able to retain access to those pages even after Xen started reusing them for other purposes.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2022-01-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-404

Affected products

  • xen / xen
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 34
  • debian / debian_linux / 11.0

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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