Multiple memory leaks in Xen 4.0 through 4.6.x allow local guest administrators or domains with certain permission to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via a large number of "teardowns" of domains with the vcpu pointer array allocated using the (1) XEN_DOMCTL_max_vcpus hypercall or the xenoprofile state vcpu pointer array allocated using the (2) XENOPROF_get_buffer or (3) XENOPROF_set_passive hypercall.
The MITRE CVE dictionary describes this issue as:
Find out more about CVE-2015-7969 from the MITRE CVE dictionary dictionary and NIST NVD.
| Platform | Package | State |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 | xen | Not affected |
The leak is small. Preventing the creation of large numbers of new domains, and limiting the number of times an existing domain can be rebooted, can reduce the impact of this vulnerability. Switching from disaggregated to a non-disaggregated operation does NOT mitigate the XEN_DOMCTL_max_vcpus vulnerability. Rather, it simply recategorises the vulnerability to hostile management code, regarding it "as designed"; thus it merely reclassifies these issues as "not a bug". Users and vendors of disaggregated systems should not change their configuration.
Vulmon