CVE-2020-15566 Denial of service in n/a

Medium 6.5 Published Updated

Guest OS users can crash the host OS due to incorrect error handling in event-channel port allocation when configured with high channel limits.

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-2020-15566?

CVE-2020-15566 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 7 Jul 2020. 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 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a host OS crash because of incorrect error handling in event-channel port allocation. The allocation of an event-channel port may fail for multiple reasons: (1) port is already in use, (2) the memory allocation failed, or (3) the port we try to allocate is higher than what is supported by the ABI (e.g., 2L or FIFO) used by the guest or the limit set by an administrator (max_event_channels in xl cfg). Due to the missing error checks, only (1) will be considered an error. All the other cases will provide a valid port and will result in a crash when trying to access the event channel. When the administrator configured a guest to allow more than 1023 event channels, that guest may be able to crash the host. When Xen is out-of-memory, allocation of new event channels will result in crashing the host rather than reporting an error. Xen versions 4.10 and later are affected. All architectures are affected. The default configuration, when guests are created with xl/libxl, is not vulnerable, because of the default event-channel limit.

Weakness: CWE-754

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-15566?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Xen Xen.

How do I fix CVE-2020-15566?

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-2020-15566 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-15566 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as ALPINE-CVE-2020-15566, DEBIAN-CVE-2020-15566, GHSA-2v7g-8jvx-2wfc, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-15566.

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