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Fencer Vulns
high 7.1

CVE-2021-47277 json

kvm: avoid speculation-based attacks from out-of-range memslot accesses

published 2024-05-21 2 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2021-34282

cvss
7.1
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 17%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

kvm: avoid speculation-based attacks from out-of-range memslot accesses

KVM's mechanism for accessing guest memory translates a guest physical address (gpa) to a host virtual address using the right-shifted gpa (also known as gfn) and a struct kvm_memory_slot. The translation is performed in __gfn_to_hva_memslot using the following formula:

hva = slot->userspace_addr + (gfn - slot->base_gfn) * PAGE_SIZE

It is expected that gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory. However, a guest can access invalid physical addresses in such a way that the gfn is invalid.

__gfn_to_hva_memslot is called from kvm_vcpu_gfn_to_hva_prot, which first retrieves a memslot through __gfn_to_memslot. While __gfn_to_memslot does check that the gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory or not, a CPU can speculate the result of the check and continue execution speculatively using an illegal gfn. The speculation can result in calculating an out-of-bounds hva. If the resulting host virtual address is used to load another guest physical address, this is effectively a Spectre gadget consisting of two consecutive reads, the second of which is data dependent on the first.

Right now it's not clear if there are any cases in which this is exploitable. One interesting case was reported by the original author of this patch, and involves visiting guest page tables on x86. Right now these are not vulnerable because the hva read goes through get_user(), which contains an LFENCE speculation barrier. However, there are patches in progress for x86 uaccess.h to mask kernel addresses instead of using LFENCE; once these land, a guest could use speculation to read from the VMM's ring 3 address space. Other architectures such as ARM already use the address masking method, and would be susceptible to this same kind of data-dependent access gadgets. Therefore, this patch proactively protects from these attacks by masking out-of-bounds gfns in __gfn_to_hva_memslot, which blocks speculation of invalid hvas.

Sean Christopherson noted that this patch does not cover kvm_read_guest_offset_cached. This however is limited to a few bytes past the end of the cache, and therefore it is unlikely to be useful in the context of building a chain of data dependent accesses.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 4.4.273, 4.9.273, 4.14.237, 4.19.195, 5.4.126, 5.10.44, 5.12.11, 5.13
  • linux Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 5.10.46-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2021-47277

  • linux Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-156.163
  • linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-81.91
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-1111.118
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1055.58
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1051.55
  • linux-kvm Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 4.15.0-1099.101
  • linux-kvm Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1045.47
  • linux-azure Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0-1056.58

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2021-47277

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

  • kernel-syms SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5 4.12.14-122.219.1
  • kernel-source SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5 4.12.14-122.219.1
  • kernel-default SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5, SLE Workstation Extension 12 SP5 +2 more 4.12.14-122.219.1
  • kernel-obs-build SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP5 4.12.14-122.219.1
  • kernel-rt SLE Real Time 12 SP5 4.12.14-10.188.1
  • kernel-syms-rt SLE Real Time 12 SP5 4.12.14-10.188.1
  • kernel-rt_debug SLE Real Time 12 SP5 4.12.14-10.188.1
  • kernel-source-rt SLE Real Time 12 SP5 4.12.14-10.188.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2024:2184-1SUSE-SU-2024:1983-1SUSE-SU-2024:1979-1

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-2021-47277 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: kvm: avoid speculation-based attacks from out-of-range memslot accesses

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    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

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.26% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 17% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
Technology feeds

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.