# CVE-2020-29482: Denial of service in n/a

> A malicious guest administrator can cause management tools to fail by creating excessively long xenstore paths in oxenstored.

- **Severity:** Medium 6.0 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/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:** 15 Dec 2020
- **Updated:** 4 Aug 2024
- **Also known as:** ALPINE-CVE-2020-29482, DEBIAN-CVE-2020-29482, GHSA-8458-3j4r-x5w4, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-29482

## What is CVE-2020-29482?

CVE-2020-29482 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 15 Dec 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 4.14.x. A guest may access xenstore paths via absolute paths containing a full pathname, or via a relative path, which implicitly includes /local/domain/$DOMID for their own domain id. Management tools must access paths in guests' namespaces, necessarily using absolute paths. oxenstored imposes a pathname limit that is applied solely to the relative or absolute path specified by the client. Therefore, a guest can create paths in its own namespace which are too long for management tools to access. Depending on the toolstack in use, a malicious guest administrator might cause some management tools and debugging operations to fail. For example, a guest administrator can cause "xenstore-ls -r" to fail. However, a guest administrator cannot prevent the host administrator from tearing down the domain. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.

Weakness: CWE-426 (Untrusted Search Path)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-29482?

It affects 3 products.


Products: Debian Debian Linux, Fedoraproject Fedora, Xen Xen.

## How do I fix CVE-2020-29482?

Apply the vendor's patch.

## Is CVE-2020-29482 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-29482 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

- [CVE-2015-3306](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2015-3306/): ProFTPD Improper Access Control (critical 10.0, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2025-49113](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-49113/): RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data (critical 9.9, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2026-24061](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-24061/): GNU InetUtils Argument Injection (critical 9.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2025-39682](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-39682/): Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions (critical 9.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2024-9680](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-9680/): Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free (critical 9.8, exploited in the wild)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2020-29482 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2020-29482 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 15 Dec 2020. 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-2020-29482 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: Debian Debian Linux. 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-2020-29482/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2020-29482/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2020-29482
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-29482
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2020-29482

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2020-29482/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.