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Fencer Intel
medium 4.9

CVE-2012-4538 json

The HVMOP_pagetable_dying hypercall in Xen 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 does not properly check the pagetable state when running on shadow pagetables,…

published 2012-11-24 13 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2012-4466

cvss
4.9
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 38%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The HVMOP_pagetable_dying hypercall in Xen 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 does not properly check the pagetable state when running on shadow pagetables, which allows a local HVM guest OS to cause a denial of service (hypervisor crash) via unspecified vectors.

Patch / fix

  • xen Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.1.3-4

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2012-4538

  • xen openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.7.0_12-1.3

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10196-1

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-2012-4538 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: xen: Unhooking empty PAE entries can crash Xen

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 kernel-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

0.44% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 38% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 4.9 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation

References

Sources

Fencer Intel 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.