CVE-2018-7542 — An issue was discovered in Xen 4

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.8.x through 4.10.x allowing x86 PVH guest OS users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and hypervisor crash) by leveraging the mishandling of configurations that lack a Local APIC.

01What is this vulnerability?

An issue was discovered in Xen 4.8.x through 4.10.x allowing x86 PVH guest OS users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and hypervisor crash) by leveraging the mishandling of configurations that lack a Local APIC.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2018-02-27T19:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-05T06:31:04.775Z

09References

• xenbits.xen.org — https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-256.html
• security.gentoo.org — https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201810-06
• www.securitytracker.com — http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1040776
• www.debian.org — https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4131