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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.0

CVE-2018-15468 json

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x.

published 2018-08-17 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2018-7346

cvss
6.0
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 27%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.11.x. The DEBUGCTL MSR contains several debugging features, some of which virtualise cleanly, but some do not. In particular, Branch Trace Store is not virtualised by the processor, and software has to be careful to configure it suitably not to lock up the core. As a result, it must only be available to fully trusted guests. Unfortunately, in the case that vPMU is disabled, all value checking was skipped, allowing the guest to choose any MSR_DEBUGCTL setting it likes. A malicious or buggy guest administrator (on Intel x86 HVM or PVH) can lock up the entire host, causing a Denial of Service.

Patch / fix

  • xen Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.11.1~pre.20180911.5acdd26fdc+dfsg-2

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2018-15468

  • xen SLE Module for Server Applications 15, SLE Module for Basesystem 15 4.10.2_04-3.9.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP3, SLES 12 SP3, SLED 12 SP3 +1 more 4.9.3_03-3.44.2
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES 12 SP2-LTSS, SLES 12 SP2-BCL +2 more 4.7.6_05-43.42.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:4300-1SUSE-SU-2018:3490-1SUSE-SU-2018:3332-1

  • xen openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.15.1_01-1.2

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11520-1

  • xen Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +13 more 4.11.1-r0
  • xen Alpine 3.6 4.8.5-r0
  • xen Alpine 3.7 4.9.3-r0
  • xen Alpine 3.8 4.10.1-r3

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2018-15468

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2018-15468 updated cvss 6.0

xen: x86 Incorrect MSR_DEBUGCTL handling lets guests enable BTS (XSA-269)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 xen
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.34% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 27% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 6.0 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.9 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.