Resource exhaustion in Xen

CVE-2020-29486

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Nodes in xenstore have an ownership. In oxenstored, a owner could give a node away. However, node ownership has quota implications. Any guest can run another guest out of quota, or create an unbounded number of nodes owned by dom0, thus running xenstored out of memory A malicious guest administrator can cause a denial of service against a specific guest or against the whole host. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.

EPSS: 0.004 (33.3th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.0 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2020-29486?
CVE-2020-29486 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Xen, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 6.0/10. Published 2020-12-15.
How severe is CVE-2020-29486?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.0 out of 10.