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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2020-11742 json

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of bad continuation handling in…

published 2020-04-14 6 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2020-4084

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 35%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.13.x, allowing guest OS users to cause a denial of service because of bad continuation handling in GNTTABOP_copy. Grant table operations are expected to return 0 for success, and a negative number for errors. The fix for CVE-2017-12135 introduced a path through grant copy handling where success may be returned to the caller without any action taken. In particular, the status fields of individual operations are left uninitialised, and may result in errant behaviour in the caller of GNTTABOP_copy. A buggy or malicious guest can construct its grant table in such a way that, when a backend domain tries to copy a grant, it hits the incorrect exit path. This returns success to the caller without doing anything, which may cause crashes or other incorrect behaviour.

Patch / fix

  • xen Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.11.4-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-11742

  • xen Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 4.11.3+24-g14b62ab3e5-1ubuntu2.3

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2020-11742

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES 12 SP2-LTSS, SLES 12 SP2-BCL +1 more 4.7.6_08-43.64.1
  • xen SLE Point of Sale 11 SP3 4.2.5_22-45.36.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 15, SLE High Performance Computing 15-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15-ESPOS 4.10.4_10-3.31.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP3, SLES 12 SP3-LTSS, SLES 12 SP3-BCL +4 more 4.9.4_06-3.62.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5, SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP5 4.12.2_04-3.11.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP4, SLES 12 SP4, SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP4 4.11.3_04-2.23.1
  • xen SLE Module for Server Applications 15 SP1, SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP1 4.12.2_04-3.15.1
  • xen SLES 11 SP4-LTSS 4.4.4_42-61.52.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2020:2234-1SUSE-SU-2020:14448-1SUSE-SU-2020:14444-1SUSE-SU-2020:1634-1SUSE-SU-2020:1630-1SUSE-SU-2020:1139-1

  • xen openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.15.1_01-1.2
  • xen openSUSE Leap 15.1 4.12.2_04-lp151.2.15.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11520-1openSUSE-SU-2020:0599-1

  • xen Alpine 3.10 4.12.2-r1
  • xen Alpine 3.11 4.13.0-r1
  • xen Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +10 more 4.13.0-r3
  • xen Alpine 3.8 4.10.4-r3
  • xen Alpine 3.9 4.11.3-r2

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2020-11742

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-2020-11742 updated cvss 5.9

xen: bad continuation handling in GNTTABOP_copy (XSA-318)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 kernel-xen
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”

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

0.41% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 35% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 2.1 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

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.