x86: 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.
CVE-2021-28689
Score 5.5 from GitHub Security Advisory published 2022-05-24. NVD baseline CVSS 5.5; sources differ by 0.0.
- Lower severity and no public exploit yet
No vendor fix yet — apply a workaround or compensating control (WAF / firewall / segmentation) and watch for a patch.
- CVSS v3
- 5.5
- EG Score
- 5.5(medium)
- EPSS
- 29.6%
- KEV
- Not listed
Published
June 11, 2021
Last Modified
November 21, 2024
References (2)
- security@xenhttps://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-370.txt
- af854a3a-2127-422b-91ae-364da2661108https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-370.txt
Weakness Classification(2)
MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration — the root-cause categories this CVE belongs to.
Data Freshness Timeline
(refreshed 9× in last 7d / 46× in last 30d)
Each row is a source pipeline that fetched or updated this CVE on that date, with what changed. For example, "NVD update" means NVD published or revised its analysis for this CVE; "MITRE cvelistV5" means we ingested or refreshed it from the CNA feed. Most recent first.
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Same CWE
10 shownCWE-119 · CWE-212
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