SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2020-29484

A malicious guest that registers a watch using a very large tag (i.e., with a registration operation payload length close to the 4096 byte limit) can cause the generation of watch events with a payload length larger than 4096 bytes, by writing to…

MEDIUM 6.0EPSS 0.39%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.39%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. When a Xenstore watch fires, the xenstore client that registered the watch will receive a Xenstore message containing the path of the modified Xenstore entry that triggered the watch, and the tag that was specified when registering the watch. Any communication with xenstored is done via Xenstore messages, consisting of a message header and the payload. The payload length is limited to 4096 bytes. Any request to xenstored resulting in a response with a payload longer than 4096 bytes will result in an error. When registering a watch, the payload length limit applies to the combined length of the watched path and the specified tag. Because watches for a specific path are also triggered for all nodes below that path, the payload of a watch event message can be longer than the payload needed to register the watch. A malicious guest that registers a watch using a very large tag (i.e., with a registration operation payload length close to the 4096 byte limit) can cause the generation of watch events with a payload length larger than 4096 bytes, by writing to Xenstore entries below the watched path. This will result in an error condition in xenstored. This error can result in a NULL pointer dereference, leading to a crash of xenstored. A malicious guest administrator can cause xenstored to crash, leading to a denial of service. Following a xenstored crash, domains may continue to run, but management operations will be impossible. Only C xenstored is affected, oxenstored is not affected.

CVSS 3.1
6.0 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS
0.39% probability · 33th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-476
Affected
xen/xen · debian/debian linux · fedoraproject/fedora
Source
cve@mitre.org
EPSS trend
0%3%5%26 October 2026: 0.39%26 October 202626 October 2026

EPSS 0.4% since 26 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.