The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled. However, the original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown (XPTI) deliberately left interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active. As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.
History

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 15:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'no', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}


cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: XEN

Published:

Updated: 2025-06-03T14:40:56.728Z

Reserved: 2023-10-27T07:55:35.332Z

Link: CVE-2023-46836

cve-icon Vulnrichment

Updated: 2024-08-02T20:53:21.940Z

cve-icon NVD

Status : Modified

Published: 2024-01-05T17:15:11.197

Modified: 2025-06-03T15:15:42.700

Link: CVE-2023-46836

cve-icon Redhat

No data.