Vulnerability Database

289,599

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2023-46836

The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled.

However, the original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown (XPTI) deliberately left interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active.

As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.

  • Published: Jan 5, 2024
  • Updated: Jan 12, 2024
  • CVE: CVE-2023-46836
  • Severity: Low
  • Exploit:

CVSS v3:

  • Severity: Low
  • Score: 4.7
  • AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

No CWE or OWASP classifications available.