CVE-2021-28710

HIGH

Xen - Improper Privilege Management in VT-d IOMMU Shared Page Table Mode

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

certain VT-d IOMMUs may not work in shared page table mode For efficiency reasons, address translation control structures (page tables) may (and, on suitable hardware, by default will) be shared between CPUs, for second-level translation (EPT), and IOMMUs. These page tables are presently set up to always be 4 levels deep. However, an IOMMU may require the use of just 3 page table levels. In such a configuration the lop level table needs to be stripped before inserting the root table's address into the hardware pagetable base register. When sharing page tables, Xen erroneously skipped this stripping. Consequently, the guest is able to write to leaf page table entries.

References (3)

Core 3
Core References
Vendor Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-390.txt
Third Party Advisory vendor-advisory x_refsource_gentoo
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202208-23

Scores

CVSS v3 8.8
EPSS 0.0004
EPSS Percentile 13.5%
Attack Vector LOCAL
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-269
Status published
Products (2)
fedoraproject/fedora 35
xen/xen 4.15.0
Published Nov 21, 2021
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026