CVE-2015-7970 Denial of service in n/a

Medium 4.9 Published 30 Oct 2015 Updated 6 Aug 2024

Local guest administrators can cause a denial of service by triggering a time-consuming linear scan in the Xen hypervisor's memory management.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: An administrator
Attackable: Local or same network only
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2015-7970?

CVE-2015-7970 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Xen Xen, published on 30 Oct 2015. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The p2m_pod_emergency_sweep function in arch/x86/mm/p2m-pod.c in Xen 3.4.x, 3.5.x, and 3.6.x is not preemptible, which allows local x86 HVM guest administrators to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption and possibly reboot) via crafted memory contents that triggers a "time-consuming linear scan," related to Populate-on-Demand.

Weakness: CWE-399

Which versions are affected by CVE-2015-7970?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Xen Xen.

How do I fix CVE-2015-7970?

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-2015-7970 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2015-7970 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Xen Xen vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2015-7970, GHSA-3g2j-g4j4-88m6, UBUNTU-CVE-2015-7970.