CVE-2023-46836
MEDIUM4.7EPSS 0.02%Published: 1/5/2024Modified: 12/3/2025
Also known as:ALPINE-CVE-2023-46836
Description
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.
Affected packages (2)
- Alpine/xenfrom 0, < 4.15.5-r3
- Debian/xenfrom 0
CVSS scores
| Source | Version | Severity | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| osv | CVSS 3.1 | MEDIUM4.7 | CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N |