Resource exhaustion in Xen
CVE-2018-15470
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x. The logic in oxenstored for handling writes depended on the order of evaluation of expressions making up a tuple. As indicated in section 7.7.3 "Operations on data structures" of the OCaml manual, the order of evaluation of subexpressions is not specified. In practice, different implementations behave differently. Thus, oxenstored may not enforce the configured quota-maxentity. This allows a malicious or buggy guest to write as many xenstore entries as it wishes, causing unbounded memory usage in oxenstored. This can lead to a system-wide DoS.
Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)
EPSS: 0.004 (32.7th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 6.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H.
Affected products
- Xen
- N/a — versions n/a
Weakness classification (CWE)
References
- cve@mitre.org (vendor-advisory, Third Party Advisory, x_refsource_GENTOO)
- cve@mitre.org (mailing-list, x_refsource_MLIST)
- cve@mitre.org (x_refsource_MISC, Vendor Advisory)
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2018-15470?
- CVE-2018-15470 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Xen, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2018-08-17.
- How severe is CVE-2018-15470?
- Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.