Re: Xen Security Advisory 466 v3 (CVE-2024-53241) - Xen hypercall page unsafe against speculative attacks

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2025-01-02 at 13:07 +0100, Jürgen Groß wrote:
> On 23.12.24 15:24, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > On Tue, 2024-12-17 at 12:18 +0000, Xen.org security team wrote:
> > >               Xen Security Advisory CVE-2024-53241 / XSA-466
> > >                                  version 3
> > > 
> > >           Xen hypercall page unsafe against speculative attacks
> > > 
> > > UPDATES IN VERSION 3
> > > ====================
> > > 
> > > Update of patch 5, public release.
> > 
> > Can't we even use the hypercall page early in boot? Surely we have to
> > know whether we're running on an Intel or AMD CPU before we get to the
> > point where we can enable any of the new control-flow integrity
> > support? Do we need to jump through those hoops do do that early
> > detection and setup?
> 
> The downside of this approach would be to have another variant to do
> hypercalls. So you'd have to replace the variant being able to use AMD
> or INTEL specific instructions with a function doing the hypercall via
> the hypercall page.

You'd probably start with the hypercall function just jumping directly
into the temporary hypercall page during early boot, and then you'd
update them to use the natively prepared vmcall/vmmcall version later.

All the complexity of patching and CPU detection in early boot seems to
be somewhat gratuitous and even counter-productive given the change it
introduces to 64-bit latching.

And even if the 64-bit latch does happen when HVM_PARAM_CALLBACK_IRQ is
set, isn't that potentially a lot later in boot? Xen will be treating
this guest as 32-bit until then, so won't all the vcpu_info and
runstate structures be wrong even as the secondary CPUs are already up
and running?

> I'm planning to send patches for Xen and the kernel to add CPUID feature
> bits indicating which instruction to use. This will make life much easier.
> 
> > Enabling the hypercall page is also one of the two points where Xen
> > will 'latch' that the guest is 64-bit, which affects the layout of the
> > shared_info, vcpu_info and runstate structures.
> > 
> > The other such latching point is when the guest sets
> > HVM_PARAM_CALLBACK_IRQ, and I *think* that should work in all
> > implementations of the Xen ABI (including QEMU/KVM and EC2). But would
> > want to test.
> > 
> > But perhaps it wouldn't hurt for maximal compatibility for Linux to set
> > the hypercall page *anyway*, even if Linux doesn't then use it — or
> > only uses it during early boot?
> 
> I'm seeing potential problems with that approach when someone is using
> an out-of-tree module doing hypercalls.
> 
> With having the hypercall page present such a module would add a way to do
> speculative attacks, while deleting the hypercall page would result in a
> failure trying to load such a module.

Is that a response to the original patch series, or to my suggestion?

If we temporarily ask Xen to populate a hypercall page which is used
during early boot (or even if it's *not* used, and only used to make
sure Xen latches 64-bit mode early)... I don't see why that makes any
difference to modules. I wasn't suggesting we keep it around and
*export* it.

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