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
Last Modified:Nov 4, 2025
EPS:Jan 5, 2024
EPSS Score:0.00014
CVSS Score:4.7
Affected Products
Vendor
Product
Action
Vendor
Xen
Product
Xen
Xen
Xen
Exploits
No exploit reference
Common Weakness Enumeration
No CWE recorded yet
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
No CAPEC recorded yet
Related CVEs
Common Vulnerability Scoring System
Attack Vector
Network
Adjacent
Local
Physical
Privileges Required
None
Low
High
User Interaction
None
Required
Scope
Unchanged
Changed
Confidentiality
None
Low
High
Integrity
None
Low
High
Availability
None
Low
High
