# CVE-2018-15470: Denial of service in n/a

> A malicious guest can cause unbounded memory usage in oxenstored by bypassing quota limits, leading to a system-wide denial of service.

- **Severity:** Medium 6.5 (`CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H`)
- **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:** Yes
- **Published:** 17 Aug 2018
- **Updated:** 5 Aug 2024
- **Also known as:** ALPINE-CVE-2018-15470, DEBIAN-CVE-2018-15470, GHSA-9xrv-h87m-r2vc, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-15470

## What is CVE-2018-15470?

CVE-2018-15470 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Xen Xen, published on 17 Aug 2018. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

### Official description

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.

Weakness: CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-15470?

It affects 1 product.


Products: Xen Xen.

## How do I fix CVE-2018-15470?

Apply the vendor's patch.

## Is CVE-2018-15470 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-15470 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in Xen Xen

- [CVE-2017-10912](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2017-10912/): Privilege escalation in n/a (critical 10.0)
- [CVE-2017-10918](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2017-10918/): Memory corruption in n/a (critical 10.0)
- [CVE-2017-10920](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2017-10920/): Memory corruption in n/a (critical 10.0)
- [CVE-2017-10921](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2017-10921/): Memory corruption in n/a (critical 10.0)
- [CVE-2025-27466](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-27466/): Mutiple vulnerabilities in the Viridian interface (critical 9.8)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2018-15470 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2018-15470 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Xen Xen, published on 17 Aug 2018. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Exploitation: There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-15470 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: Xen Xen. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2018-15470/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2018-15470/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2018-15470
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-15470
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2018-15470

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2018-15470/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.