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Fencer Intel
medium 6.2

CVE-2016-6259 json

Xen 4.5.x through 4.7.x do not implement Supervisor Mode Access Prevention (SMAP) whitelisting in 32-bit exception and event delivery, whic…

published 2016-08-02 10 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-7189

cvss
6.2
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.6%
EPSS 0.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 50%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Xen 4.5.x through 4.7.x do not implement Supervisor Mode Access Prevention (SMAP) whitelisting in 32-bit exception and event delivery, which allows local 32-bit PV guest OS kernels to cause a denial of service (hypervisor and VM crash) by triggering a safety check.

Patch / fix

  • xen Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.8.0~rc3-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-6259

  • xen Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 4.6.0-1ubuntu4.2

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2016-6259

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 SP1, SLES 12 SP1, SLED 12 SP1 +1 more 4.5.3_10-20.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP1, SLES 12 SP1, SLED 12 SP1 +1 more 4.5.3_08-17.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2016:2473-1SUSE-SU-2016:2093-1

  • xen openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.7.0_12-1.3

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10196-1

  • xen Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +17 more 4.7.0-r0
  • xen Alpine 3.4 4.6.3-r1

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2016-6259

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-2016-6259 updated cvss 6.3

xen: x86: Missing SMAP whitelisting in 32-bit exception / event delivery (XSA-183)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 xen
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

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

0.64% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 50% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 6.2 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/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
  • 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.