CVE-2024-35804

Technical Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

KVM: x86: Mark target gfn of emulated atomic instruction as dirty

When emulating an atomic access on behalf of the guest, mark the target

gfn dirty if the CMPXCHG by KVM is attempted and doesn't fault. This

fixes a bug where KVM effectively corrupts guest memory during live

migration by writing to guest memory without informing userspace that the

page is dirty.

Marking the page dirty got unintentionally dropped when KVM's emulated

CMPXCHG was converted to do a user access. Before that, KVM explicitly

mapped the guest page into kernel memory, and marked the page dirty during

the unmap phase.

Mark the page dirty even if the CMPXCHG fails, as the old data is written

back on failure, i.e. the page is still written. The value written is

guaranteed to be the same because the operation is atomic, but KVM's ABI

is that all writes are dirty logged regardless of the value written. And

more importantly, that's what KVM di

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from linux. Update linux_kernel to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References