# CVE-2019-19577: Race condition in n/a

> A race condition in Xen's IOMMU pagetable updates allows malicious HVM guests to cause hypervisor crashes or potentially escalate privileges.

- **Severity:** High 7.2 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** An administrator
- **Attackable:** Local or same network only
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** Yes
- **Published:** 11 Dec 2019
- **Updated:** 5 Aug 2024
- **Also known as:** ALPINE-CVE-2019-19577, DEBIAN-CVE-2019-19577, GHSA-6gpv-cjwj-gqjp, UBUNTU-CVE-2019-19577

## What is CVE-2019-19577?

CVE-2019-19577 is a high-severity vulnerability in Fedoraproject Fedora, published on 11 Dec 2019. 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 4.12.x allowing x86 AMD HVM guest OS users to cause a denial of service or possibly gain privileges by triggering data-structure access during pagetable-height updates. When running on AMD systems with an IOMMU, Xen attempted to dynamically adapt the number of levels of pagetables (the pagetable height) in the IOMMU according to the guest's address space size. The code to select and update the height had several bugs. Notably, the update was done without taking a lock which is necessary for safe operation. A malicious guest administrator can cause Xen to access data structures while they are being modified, causing Xen to crash. Privilege escalation is thought to be very difficult but cannot be ruled out. Additionally, there is a potential memory leak of 4kb per guest boot, under memory pressure. Only Xen on AMD CPUs is vulnerable. Xen running on Intel CPUs is not vulnerable. ARM systems are not vulnerable. Only systems where guests are given direct access to physical devices are vulnerable. Systems which do not use PCI pass-through are not vulnerable. Only HVM guests can exploit the vulnerability. PV and PVH guests cannot. All versions of Xen with IOMMU support are vulnerable.

Weakness: CWE-662 (Improper Synchronization), CWE-401 (Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2019-19577?

It affects 2 products.


Products: Fedoraproject Fedora, Xen Xen.

## How do I fix CVE-2019-19577?

Apply the vendor's patch.

## Is CVE-2019-19577 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2019-19577 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in Fedoraproject Fedora

- [CVE-2024-4577](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-4577/): PHP-CGI OS Command Injection (critical 9.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2021-39226](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2021-39226/): Grafana Authentication Bypass (critical 9.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2019-5544](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2019-5544/): VMware ESXi and Horizon DaaS OpenSLP Heap-Based Buffer Overflow (critical 9.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2024-4947](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-4947/): Google Chromium V8 Type Confusion (critical 9.6, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2024-4671](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-4671/): Google Chromium Visuals Use-After-Free (critical 9.6, exploited in the wild)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2019-19577 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2019-19577 is a high-severity vulnerability in Fedoraproject Fedora, published on 11 Dec 2019. 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-2019-19577 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: Fedoraproject Fedora. 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-2019-19577/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2019-19577/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2019-19577
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-19577
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2019-19577

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2019-19577/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.