An issue was discovered in Xen 4.7 through 4.10.x. libxl fails to pass the readonly flag to qemu when setting up a SCSI disk, due to what was probably an erroneous merge conflict resolution. Malicious guest administrators or (in some situations) users may be able to write to supposedly read-only disk images. Only emulated SCSI disks (specified as sd in the libxl disk configuration, or an equivalent) are affected. IDE disks (hd) are not affected (because attempts to make them readonly are rejected). Additionally, CDROM devices (that is, devices specified to be presented to the guest as CDROMs, regardless of the nature of the backing storage on the host) are not affected; they are always read only. Only systems using qemu-xen (rather than qemu-xen-traditional) as the device model version are vulnerable. Only systems using libxl or libxl-based toolstacks are vulnerable. (This includes xl, and libvirt with the libxl driver.) The vulnerability is present in Xen versions 4.7 and later. (In earlier versions, provided that the patch for XSA-142 has been applied, attempts to create read only disks are rejected.) If the host and guest together usually support PVHVM, the issue is exploitable only if the malicious guest administrator has control of the guest kernel or guest kernel command line.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian_linux | Debian | 9.0 (including) | 9.0 (including) |
| Xen | Ubuntu | artful | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | bionic | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | cosmic | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | disco | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | eoan | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | esm-infra/bionic | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | groovy | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | hirsute | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | impish | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | trusty | * |
| Xen | Ubuntu | upstream | * |
There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:
Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:
Information exposures can occur in different ways:
It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.