CVE-2022-42336

LOW
3.3
CVSS Score
Published: May 17, 2023 at 12:00 AM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 05:04 AM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorXen

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Severity
LOW3.3
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.3%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

Mishandling of guest SSBD selection on AMD hardware The current logic to set SSBD on AMD Family 17h and Hygon Family 18h processors requires that the setting of SSBD is coordinated at a core level, as the setting is shared between threads. Logic was introduced to keep track of how many threads require SSBD active in order to coordinate it, such logic relies on using a per-core counter of threads that have SSBD active. When running on the mentioned hardware, it's possible for a guest to under or overflow the thread counter, because each write to VIRT_SPEC_CTRL.SSBD by the guest gets propagated to the helper that does the per-core active accounting. Underflowing the counter causes the value to get saturated, and thus attempts for guests running on the same core to set SSBD won't have effect because the hypervisor assumes it's already active.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

Xen· Xenwordpress-plugin
95%
Vendor states this is fixed in consult Xen advisory XSA-431 (unknown)

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitNot automatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

3.3LOWCISA-ADP
Attack Vector
LOCAL
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
LOW
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
LOW
Availability
NONE
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
NVD-CWE-noinfo

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