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CVE-2023-46842

Exploitation: none CVSS 6.5 MEDIUM

CVSS base score: 6.5 (Medium) CISA · v3.1

Score assigned by CISA's Vulnrichment program; the vendor's CVE record did not include one.

Vendor: Xen   Product: Xen

Description

Unlike 32-bit PV guests, HVM guests may switch freely between 64-bit and other modes. This in particular means that they may set registers used to pass 32-bit-mode hypercall arguments to values outside of the range 32-bit code would be able to set them to. When processing of hypercalls takes a considerable amount of time, the hypervisor may choose to invoke a hypercall continuation. Doing so involves putting (perhaps updated) hypercall arguments in respective registers. For guests not running in 64-bit mode this further involves a certain amount of translation of the values. Unfortunately internal sanity checking of these translated values assumes high halves of registers to always be clear when invoking a hypercall. When this is found not to be the case, it triggers a consistency check in the hypervisor and causes a crash.

Lifecycle Timeline

Each milestone comes from a different source, so gaps between them are gaps in what those sources publish, not evidence that nothing happened. EPSS history for this CVE holds 135 points from 2024-05-18, tracked daily from 2026-09-09; earlier points are weekly, which dates a spike to within a week. Peak probability 8.5% on 2026-06-20.

Published Applicability

Red Hat CSAF/VEX 0 affected · 0 fixed · 1 not affected
CVE List v5 (CNA container) 0 affected · 0 fixed · 0 not affected

Check whether a specific version is affected →

What each source publishes about which product versions carry this vulnerability, kept as written rather than merged. Absence here means no source has published applicability data, not that nothing is affected.

Research & News Coverage

No mentions found in monitored research blogs or news feeds.

Detection & Exploitation

Exploit / Pen Test
none published
Network IDS/IPS
none published
Host / SIEM
none published

Coverage across public collections only: Nuclei and OpenVAS NVT (scan); Snort and Suricata ET Open (network); Sigma and YARA (host/SIEM); Metasploit, Exploit-DB and public GitHub repositories (exploit). Absence here means nothing public was found, not that detection is impossible.
GitHub PoC repositories are collected automatically by PoC-in-GitHub (CC0) and are not vetted: some are fakes and some are malware. Treat them as evidence that code was published, not as code to run.
OpenVAS coverage derives from the Greenbone Community Feed, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0; its individual Vulnerability Tests are licensed GNU GPL v2.

Distribution Status

Debian · xen bookworm 4.17.5+23-ga4e5191dc0-1 trixie 4.19.1-1 forky 4.19.1-1 sid 4.19.1-1 scope: local

Where the distribution has shipped a fix, and in which version. Green means the release has resolved it, amber that it is still open. Data from the Debian Security Tracker, used under Debian's MIT / GPLv2+ terms. Debian is upstream of several other distributions, so a fix here often precedes theirs.

CISA Assessment (Vulnrichment / SSVC)

none
no
partial
6.5 MEDIUM
—
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
CWE-843 — Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type ('Type Confusion')
2024-05-24

Listed By

SourceDateRecord
CISA Vulnrichment 2024-05-24 source record →

Referenced in Advisories

DateAdvisoryIssuer
2024-04-12 Citrix Releases Security Updates for XenServer and Citrix Hypervisor CISA

Weaponization Timeline — Offensive & Testing Tools

No exploit-tool sightings recorded for this CVE.

Evidence tiers are explained on the About page — a merged Metasploit module is far stronger evidence than a distro package mention.

External References