CVE-2023-46842: Fedoraproject Fedora
Medium severity, CVSS 6.5. EPSS: 8.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.
Unlike 32-bit PV guests, HVM guests may switch freely between 64-bit and other modes. This in particular means that they may set registers used to pass 32-bit-mode hypercall arguments to values outside of the range 32-bit code would be able to set them to. When processing of hypercalls takes a considerable amount of time, the hypervisor may choose to invoke a hypercall continuation. Doing so involves putting (perhaps updated) hypercall arguments in respective registers. For guests not running in 64-bit mode this further involves a certain amount of translation of the values. Unfortunately internal sanity checking of these translated values assumes high halves of registers to always be clear when invoking a hypercall. When this is found not to be the case, it triggers a consistency check in the hypervisor and causes a crash.
Affected products
- Fedoraproject Fedora: version 38 only; version 40 only
- Xen Xen: from 3.2.0
Published 2024-05-16. Last modified 2026-06-17.