SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2022-42336

When running on the mentioned hardware, it's possible for a guest to under or overflow the thread counter, because each write to VIRT_SPEC_CTRL.SSBD by the guest gets propagated to the helper that does the per-core active accounting.

LOW 3.3EPSS 0.27%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.27%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

Mishandling of guest SSBD selection on AMD hardware The current logic to set SSBD on AMD Family 17h and Hygon Family 18h processors requires that the setting of SSBD is coordinated at a core level, as the setting is shared between threads. Logic was introduced to keep track of how many threads require SSBD active in order to coordinate it, such logic relies on using a per-core counter of threads that have SSBD active. When running on the mentioned hardware, it's possible for a guest to under or overflow the thread counter, because each write to VIRT_SPEC_CTRL.SSBD by the guest gets propagated to the helper that does the per-core active accounting. Underflowing the counter causes the value to get saturated, and thus attempts for guests running on the same core to set SSBD won't have effect because the hypervisor assumes it's already active.

CVSS 3.1
3.3 LOWCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
EPSS
0.27% probability · 18th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Affected
xen/xen
Source
security@xen.org
EPSS trend
0%3%5%26 October 2026: 0.27%26 October 202626 October 2026

EPSS 0.3% 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.