CVE-2018-8897 Opens Xen PV Systems Up To Exploit

Besides kernels being addressed for the newly-disclosed CVE-2018-8897 vulnerability, users of Xen para-virtualization should also run a patched Xen system right away.

This security vulnerability can allow a malicious Xen PV guest with unprivileged rights to escalate their privilege to that of the hypervisor. Fortunately, only Xen PV on x86 is affected and not Xen HVM or PVH guests. Additionally, only x86-based AMD/Intel systems are affected.

The privilege escalation is a bit more eventful than the vulnerable kernels being just subject to denial of service / crashing. More details on the Xen impact and the available patches via XSA-260.