Cyber Resilience

CVE-2024-45818

Medium

Published: 19 December 2024

Published
19 December 2024
Modified
20 May 2025
KEV Added
Patch
12 November 2024
CVSS Score v3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
EPSS Score 0.0027 51.3th percentile
Risk Priority 13 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2024-45818 is a medium-severity Improper Locking (CWE-667) vulnerability in Xen Xen. Its CVSS base score is 6.5 (Medium).

Operationally, ranked in the top 48.7% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the return from the function that acquired it.…

more

This behavior results in a problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a deadlock. This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but was analysed incorrectly and the fix was incomplete. Analysis in light of the new finding cannot find a way to make the existing locking discipline work. In staging, this logic has all been removed because it was discovered to be accidentally disabled since Xen 4.7. Therefore, we are fixing the locking problem by backporting the removal of most of the feature. Note that even with the feature disabled, the lock would still be acquired for any accesses to the VGA MMIO region.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

xen
xen
4.6.0 — 4.20.0

Mitigating Controls

No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.

References