FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

xen-tools -- Unmediated PCI command register access in qemu

Affected packages
3.3 <= xen-tools < 4.5.0_6

Details

VuXML ID 79f401cd-27e6-11e5-a4a5-002590263bf5
Discovery 2015-03-31
Entry 2015-07-11

The Xen Project reports:

HVM guests are currently permitted to modify the memory and I/O decode bits in the PCI command register of devices passed through to them. Unless the device is an SR-IOV virtual function, after disabling one or both of these bits subsequent accesses to the MMIO or I/O port ranges would - on PCI Express devices - lead to Unsupported Request responses. The treatment of such errors is platform specific.

Furthermore (at least) devices under control of the Linux pciback driver in the host are handed to guests with the aforementioned bits turned off. This means that such accesses can similarly lead to Unsupported Request responses until these flags are set as needed by the guest.

In the event that the platform surfaces aforementioned UR responses as Non-Maskable Interrupts, and either the OS is configured to treat NMIs as fatal or (e.g. via ACPI's APEI) the platform tells the OS to treat these errors as fatal, the host would crash, leading to a Denial of Service.

References

CVE Name CVE-2015-2756
URL http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-126.html