CVE-2021-28689

NameCVE-2021-28689
Descriptionx86: Speculative vulnerabilities with bare (non-shim) 32-bit PV guests 32-bit x86 PV guest kernels run in ring 1. At the time when Xen was developed, this area of the i386 architecture was rarely used, which is why Xen was able to use it to implement paravirtualisation, Xen's novel approach to virtualization. In AMD64, Xen had to use a different implementation approach, so Xen does not use ring 1 to support 64-bit guests. With the focus now being on 64-bit systems, and the availability of explicit hardware support for virtualization, fixing speculation issues in ring 1 is not a priority for processor companies. Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) is an architectural x86 extension put together to combat speculative execution sidechannel attacks, including Spectre v2. It was retrofitted in microcode to existing CPUs. For more details on Spectre v2, see: http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-254.html However, IBRS does not architecturally protect ring 0 from predictions learnt in ring 1. For more details, see: https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/deep-dives/deep-dive-indirect-branch-restricted-speculation Similar situations may exist with other mitigations for other kinds of speculative execution attacks. The situation is quite likely to be similar for speculative execution attacks which have yet to be discovered, disclosed, or mitigated.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
xen (PTS)bullseye4.14.6-1vulnerable
bullseye (security)4.14.5+94-ge49571868d-1vulnerable
bookworm4.17.3+10-g091466ba55-1~deb12u1vulnerable
sid, trixie4.17.3+36-g54dacb5c02-1vulnerable

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
xensource(unstable)(unfixed)unimportant

Notes

https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-370.html
Unfixable design/architecture limitation, no fix planned

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