CVE-2024-35804

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

KVM: x86: Mark target gfn of emulated atomic instruction as dirty

When emulating an atomic access on behalf of the guest, mark the target gfn dirty if the CMPXCHG by KVM is attempted and doesnt fault. This fixes a bug where KVM effectively corrupts guest memory during live migration by writing to guest memory without informing userspace that the page is dirty.

Marking the page dirty got unintentionally dropped when KVMs emulated CMPXCHG was converted to do a user access. Before that, KVM explicitly mapped the guest page into kernel memory, and marked the page dirty during the unmap phase.

Mark the page dirty even if the CMPXCHG fails, as the old data is written back on failure, i.e. the page is still written. The value written is guaranteed to be the same because the operation is atomic, but KVMs ABI is that all writes are dirty logged regardless of the value written. And more importantly, thats what KVM did before the buggy commit.

Huge kudos to the folks on the Cc list (and many others), who did all the actual work of triaging and debugging.

base-commit: 6769ea8da8a93ed4630f1ce64df6aafcaabfce64

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.

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://git.kernel.org/stable/c/225d587a073584946c05c9b7651d637bd45c0c71
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/726374dde5d608b15b9756bd52b6fc283fda7a06
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/910c57dfa4d113aae6571c2a8b9ae8c430975902
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9d1b22e573a3789ed1f32033ee709106993ba551
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a9bd6bb6f02bf7132c1ab192ba62bbfa52df7d66
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/225d587a073584946c05c9b7651d637bd45c0c71
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/726374dde5d608b15b9756bd52b6fc283fda7a06
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/910c57dfa4d113aae6571c2a8b9ae8c430975902
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/9d1b22e573a3789ed1f32033ee709106993ba551
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a9bd6bb6f02bf7132c1ab192ba62bbfa52df7d66