CVE-2020-29485

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.6 through 4.14.x. When acting upon a guest XS_RESET_WATCHES request, not all tracking information is freed. A guest can cause unbounded memory usage in oxenstored. This can lead to a system-wide DoS. Only systems using the Ocaml Xenstored implementation are vulnerable. Systems using the C Xenstored implementation are not vulnerable.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/2C6M6S3CIMEBACH6O7V4H2VDANMO6TVA/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/OBLV6L6Q24PPQ2CRFXDX4Q76KU776GKI/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4812
• https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-330.txt