CVE-2020-29568

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2020-12-15 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-770

Description

An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. Some OSes (such as Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD) are processing watch events using a single thread. If the events are received faster than the thread is able to handle, they will get queued. As the queue is unbounded, a guest may be able to trigger an OOM in the backend. All systems with a FreeBSD, Linux, or NetBSD (any version) dom0 are vulnerable.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0
xen: through 4.14.1

References

https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/02/msg00018.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/03/msg00010.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202107-30
https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4843
https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-349.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/02/msg00018.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/03/msg00010.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202107-30
https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4843
https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-349.html

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