XEN on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

Xen XSA 155: Double fetches in paravirtualized devices

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my research on the security of paravirtualized devices, I reported a number of vulnerabilities to the Xen security team, which were patched today. All of them are double fetch vulnerabilities affecting the different backend components used for paravirtualized devices. While the severity and impact of these bugs varies heavily and is dependent on a lot of external factors, I would recommend patching them as soon as possible. In the rest of this blog post I’ll give a short teaser about my research with full details coming out in the first quarter of 2016 .

Revisiting Xen’s x86 Emulation: Xen XSA 123

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In my last blog post, I gave an overview about recent vulnerabilities discovered in the x86 emulation layer of Xen. While both of the discussed vulnerabilities only allow for guest privilege escalation, the complexity of the involved code seemed to indicate that even more interesting bugs could be discovered. So I spent some time searching for memory corruption issues and discovered a very interesting bug that resulted in XSA 123 . This post gives an overview about the root cause of the bug and a short description of exploitation challenges. A follow-up post will describe possible exploitation strategies in more detail.

The Dangers of x86 Emulation: Xen XSA 110 and 105

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Developing a secure and feature rich hypervisor is no easy task. Recently, the open source Xen hypervisor was affected by two interesting vulnerabilities involving its x86 emulation code: XSA 110 and XSA 105. Both bugs show that the attack surface of hypervisors is often larger than expected. XSA 105 was originally reported) by Andrei Lutas from BitDefender. The patch adds missing privilege checks to the emulation routines of several critical system instructions including LGDT and LIDT. The vulnerable code can be reached from unprivileged user code running inside hardware virtual machine (HVM) guests and can be used to escalate guest privileges. XSA 110 was reported by Jan Beulich from SUSE and concerns insufficient checks when emulating long jumps, calls or returns.