Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-28701 - Race Condition vulnerability in multiple products
Attack vector
LOCAL Attack complexity
HIGH Privileges required
LOW Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
HIGH Summary
Another race in XENMAPSPACE_grant_table handling Guests are permitted access to certain Xen-owned pages of memory. The majority of such pages remain allocated / associated with a guest for its entire lifetime. Grant table v2 status pages, however, are de-allocated when a guest switches (back) from v2 to v1. Freeing such pages requires that the hypervisor enforce that no parallel request can result in the addition of a mapping of such a page to a guest. That enforcement was missing, allowing guests to retain access to pages that were freed and perhaps re-used for other purposes. Unfortunately, when XSA-379 was being prepared, this similar issue was not noticed.
Vulnerable Configurations
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Leveraging Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring when multiple processes access and manipulate the same resource concurrently and the outcome of the execution depends on the particular order in which the access takes place. The attacker can leverage a race condition by "running the race", modifying the resource and modifying the normal execution flow. For instance a race condition can occur while accessing a file, the attacker can trick the system by replacing the original file with his version and cause the system to read the malicious file.
- Leveraging Time-of-Check and Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring between the time of check (state) for a resource and the time of use of a resource. The typical example is the file access. The attacker can leverage a file access race condition by "running the race", meaning that he would modify the resource between the first time the target program accesses the file and the time the target program uses the file. During that period of time, the attacker could do something such as replace the file and cause an escalation of privilege.
References
- https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-384.txt
- http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-384.html
- http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2021/09/08/2
- https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4977
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202208-23
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/L4MI3MQAPGILCLXBGQWPZHGE3ALSO4ZU/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/CEHZLIR5DFYYQBH55AERWHLO54OFU42C/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/3HEHUIUWSSMCQGQY3GWX4J2SZGYP5W2Z/