Debian Security Advisory

DSA-2662-1 xen -- several vulnerabilities

Date Reported:
18 Apr 2013
Affected Packages:
xen
Vulnerable:
Yes
Security database references:
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2013-1917, CVE-2013-1919.
More information:

Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Xen hypervisor. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:

  • CVE-2013-1917

    The SYSENTER instruction can be used by PV guests to accelerate system call processing. This instruction, however, leaves the EFLAGS register mostly unmodified. This can be used by malicious or buggy user space to cause the entire host to crash.

  • CVE-2013-1919

    Various IRQ related access control operations may not have the intended effect, potentially permitting a stub domain to grant its client domain access to an IRQ it doesn't have access to itself. This can be used by malicious or buggy stub domains kernels to mount a denial of service attack possibly affecting the whole system.

For the stable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 4.0.1-5.9.

For the testing distribution (wheezy) and the unstable distribution (sid), these problems will be fixed soon.

We recommend that you upgrade your xen packages.