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Fencer Intel
high 8.8

CVE-2020-29481 json

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x.

published 5y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2020-21849

cvss
8.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 29%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Access rights of Xenstore nodes are per domid. Unfortunately, existing granted access rights are not removed when a domain is being destroyed. This means that a new domain created with the same domid will inherit the access rights to Xenstore nodes from the previous domain(s) with the same domid. Because all Xenstore entries of a guest below /local/domain/<domid> are being deleted by Xen tools when a guest is destroyed, only Xenstore entries of other guests still running are affected. For example, a newly created guest domain might be able to read sensitive information that had belonged to a previously existing guest domain. Both Xenstore implementations (C and Ocaml) are vulnerable.

Patch / fix

  • xen Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.14.0+88-g1d1d1f5391-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-29481

  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP3, SLES 12 SP3-LTSS, SLES 12 SP3-BCL +4 more 4.9.4_16-3.80.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 15, SLE High Performance Computing 15-LTSS, SLE High Performance Computing 15-ESPOS 4.10.4_24-3.53.1
  • xen SLE Module for Server Applications 15 SP2, SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP2 4.13.2_06-3.22.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP4, SLES 12 SP4-LTSS, OpenStack Cloud Crowbar 9 +1 more 4.11.4_16-2.48.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES 12 SP2-LTSS, SLES 12 SP2-BCL +1 more 4.7.6_14-43.73.1
  • xen SLE Module for Server Applications 15 SP1, SLE Module for Basesystem 15 SP1 4.12.4_06-3.40.1
  • xen SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5, SLE Software Development Kit 12 SP5 4.12.4_06-3.36.1
  • xen SLES 11 SP4-LTSS 4.4.4_48-61.61.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2020:3945-1SUSE-SU-2020:3916-1SUSE-SU-2020:3915-1SUSE-SU-2020:3914-1SUSE-SU-2020:3913-1SUSE-SU-2020:3881-1

  • xen openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.15.1_01-1.2
  • xen openSUSE Leap 15.2 4.13.2_06-lp152.2.21.1
  • xen openSUSE Leap 15.1 4.12.4_06-lp151.2.36.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11520-1openSUSE-SU-2020:2331-1openSUSE-SU-2020:2313-1

  • xen Alpine 3.12, Alpine 3.11 4.13.2-r3
  • xen Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +9 more 4.14.1-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2020-29481

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Is CVE-2020-29481 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2020-29481 updated cvss 6.7

xen: Xenstore: new domains inheriting existing node permissions (XSA-322)

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    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

0.35% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 29% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 8.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.6 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

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.