CVE-2012-4538 Denial of service in n/a
A local HVM guest can crash the Xen hypervisor by exploiting improper pagetable state checks in the HVMOP_pagetable_dying hypercall.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2012-4538?
CVE-2012-4538 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Xen Xen, published on 24 Nov 2012. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
The HVMOP_pagetable_dying hypercall in Xen 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 does not properly check the pagetable state when running on shadow pagetables, which allows a local HVM guest OS to cause a denial of service (hypervisor crash) via unspecified vectors.
Weakness: CWE-20
Which versions are affected by CVE-2012-4538?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Xen Xen.
How do I fix CVE-2012-4538?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2012-4538 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2012-4538 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Xen Xen
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2012-4538, GHSA-j5g3-6543-2hjc.