CVE-2021-47277 kvm: avoid speculation-based attacks from out-of-range memslot accesses
A speculative execution flaw in KVM allows a guest to potentially read host memory via out-of-bounds address calculations, requiring kernel patches to mitigate.
- 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-2021-47277?
CVE-2021-47277 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 21 May 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
kvm: avoid speculation-based attacks from out-of-range memslot accesses
KVM's mechanism for accessing guest memory translates a guest physical address (gpa) to a host virtual address using the right-shifted gpa (also known as gfn) and a struct kvm_memory_slot. The translation is performed in __gfn_to_hva_memslot using the following formula:
hva = slot->userspace_addr + (gfn - slot->base_gfn) * PAGE_SIZE
It is expected that gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory. However, a guest can access invalid physical addresses in such a way that the gfn is invalid.
__gfn_to_hva_memslot is called from kvm_vcpu_gfn_to_hva_prot, which first retrieves a memslot through __gfn_to_memslot. While __gfn_to_memslot does check that the gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory or not, a CPU can speculate the result of the check and continue execution speculatively using an illegal gfn. The speculation can result in calculating an out-of-bounds hva. If the resulting host virtual address is used to load another guest physical address, this is effectively a Spectre gadget consisting of two consecutive reads, the second of which is data dependent on the first.
Right now it's not clear if there are any cases in which this is exploitable. One interesting case was reported by the original author of this patch, and involves visiting guest page tables on x86. Right now these are not vulnerable because the hva read goes through get_user(), which contains an LFENCE speculation barrier. However, there are patches in progress for x86 uaccess.h to mask kernel addresses instead of using LFENCE; once these land, a guest could use speculation to read from the VMM's ring 3 address space. Other architectures such as ARM already use the address masking method, and would be susceptible to this same kind of data-dependent access gadgets. Therefore, this patch proactively protects from these attacks by masking out-of-bounds gfns in __gfn_to_hva_memslot, which blocks speculation of invalid hvas.
Sean Christopherson noted that this patch does not cover kvm_read_guest_offset_cached. This however is limited to a few bytes past the end of the cache, and therefore it is unlikely to be useful in the context of building a chain of data dependent accesses.
Weakness: CWE-125
Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-47277?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2021-47277?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2021-47277 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-47277 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2021-47277, GHSA-6239-6f98-f8vf, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-47277.