CVE-2023-46841 (GCVE-0-2023-46841)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2024-03-20 10:40 – Updated: 2025-11-04 18:18
VLAI?
Title
x86: shadow stack vs exceptions from emulation stubs
Summary
Recent x86 CPUs offer functionality named Control-flow Enforcement
Technology (CET). A sub-feature of this are Shadow Stacks (CET-SS).
CET-SS is a hardware feature designed to protect against Return Oriented
Programming attacks. When enabled, traditional stacks holding both data
and return addresses are accompanied by so called "shadow stacks",
holding little more than return addresses. Shadow stacks aren't
writable by normal instructions, and upon function returns their
contents are used to check for possible manipulation of a return address
coming from the traditional stack.
In particular certain memory accesses need intercepting by Xen. In
various cases the necessary emulation involves kind of replaying of
the instruction. Such replaying typically involves filling and then
invoking of a stub. Such a replayed instruction may raise an
exceptions, which is expected and dealt with accordingly.
Unfortunately the interaction of both of the above wasn't right:
Recovery involves removal of a call frame from the (traditional) stack.
The counterpart of this operation for the shadow stack was missing.
Severity ?
6.5 (Medium)
Assigner
References
Credits
This issue was discovered by Jan Beulich of SUSE.
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Sightings
| Author | Source | Type | Date |
|---|
Nomenclature
- Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
- Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
- Published Proof of Concept: A public proof of concept is available for this vulnerability.
- Exploited: The vulnerability was observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Patched: The vulnerability was observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not exploited: The vulnerability was not observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not confirmed: The user expressed doubt about the validity of the vulnerability.
- Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
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