Vulnerability in Hypervisor Affecting Xen Project VGA Memory Management

CVE-2024-45818

What is CVE-2024-45818?

CVE-2024-45818 highlights a significant vulnerability within the Xen Hypervisor that affects the management of VGA memory accesses for HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine) guests. The vulnerability stems from improper locking mechanisms, where a lock is maintained past the expected return from its controlling function. This results in a potential deadlock situation when emulating instructions involving multiple memory accesses to VGA memory. Although the issue was identified previously, earlier fixes were incomplete, leading to a re-examination of the functionality that has been disabled since Xen version 4.7. The current approach focuses on rectifying the locking practice by backporting the removal of the faulty feature to ensure greater stability and security for users.

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