Skip to content
Fencer Intel
high 8.8

CVE-2017-8904 json

Xen through 4.8.x mishandles the "contains segment descriptors" property during GNTTABOP_transfer (aka guest transfer) operations, which mi…

published 2017-05-11 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2017-17844

cvss
8.8
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 36%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Xen through 4.8.x mishandles the "contains segment descriptors" property during GNTTABOP_transfer (aka guest transfer) operations, which might allow PV guest OS users to execute arbitrary code on the host OS, aka XSA-214.

Patch / fix

  • xen Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.8.1-1+deb9u1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-8904

  • xen Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 4.4.2-0ubuntu0.14.04.11
  • xen Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 4.6.5-0ubuntu1.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2017-8904

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 Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +16 more 4.8.1-r2
  • xen Alpine 3.3 4.6.3-r7
  • xen Alpine 3.4 4.6.3-r9
  • xen Alpine 3.5 4.7.2-r1

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2017-8904

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-2017-8904 updated cvss 8.5

xen: grant transfer allows PV guest to elevate privileges (XSA-214)

  • 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

0.42% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 36% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 8.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 6.8 AV:L/AC:L/Au:S/C:C/I:C/A:C

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.