x86: shadow stack vs exceptions from emulation stubs
Get instant alerts when new vulnerabilities affect Xen - before attackers find them.
Recent x86 CPUs offer functionality named Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). A sub-feature of this are Shadow Stacks (CET-SS). CET-SS is a hardware feature designed to protect against Return Oriented Programming attacks. When enabled, traditional stacks holding both data and return addresses are accompanied by so called "shadow stacks", holding little more than return addresses. Shadow stacks aren't writable by normal instructions, and upon function returns their contents are used to check for possible manipulation of a return address coming from the traditional stack. In particular certain memory accesses need intercepting by Xen. In various cases the necessary emulation involves kind of replaying of the instruction. Such replaying typically involves filling and then invoking of a stub. Such a replayed instruction may raise an exceptions, which is expected and dealt with accordingly. Unfortunately the interaction of both of the above wasn't right: Recovery involves removal of a call frame from the (traditional) stack. The counterpart of this operation for the shadow stack was missing.
Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.
No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:
Patch and advisory references
SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.
Get alerted
Track the products you run and VulnTracker tells you when a new CVE affects them — with what is known about fixing it, and nothing about the rest.