MirageOS security advisory 03: xen with solo5 >= 0.6.6 & < 0.7.5
By Hannes Mehnert , Pierre Alain - 2022-12-07
MirageOS Security Advisory 03 - infinite loop in console output on xen
- Module: solo5
- Announced: 2022-12-07
- Credits: Krzysztof Burghardt, Pierre Alain, Thomas Leonard, Hannes Mehnert
- Affects: solo5 >= 0.6.6 & < 0.7.5, qubes-mirage-firewall >= 0.8.0 & < 0.8.4
- Corrected: 2022-12-07: solo5 0.7.5, 2022-12-07: qubes-mirage-firewall 0.8.4
- CVE: CVE-2022-46770
For general information regarding MirageOS Security Advisories, please visit https://mirageos.org/security.
Background
MirageOS is a library operating system using cooperative multitasking, which can be executed as a guest of the Xen hypervisor. Output on the console is performed via the Xen console protocol.
Problem Description
Since MirageOS moved from PV mode to PVH, and thus replacing Mini-OS with solo5, there was an issue in the solo5 code which failed to properly account the already written bytes on the console. This only occurs if the output to be performed does not fit in a single output buffer (2048 bytes on Xen).
The code in question set the number of bytes written to the last written count (written = output_some(buf)), instead of increasing the written count (written += output_some(buf)).
Impact
Console output may lead to an infinite loop, endlessly printing data onto the console.
A prominent unikernel is the Qubes MirageOS firewall, which prints some input packets onto the console. This can lead to a remote denial of service vulnerability, since any client could send a malformed and sufficiently big network packet.
Workaround
No workaround is available.
Solution
The solution is to fix the console output code in solo5, as done in https://github.com/Solo5/solo5/pull/538/commits/099be86f0a17a619fcadbb970bb9e511d28d3cd8
For the qubes-mirage-firewall, update to a solo5 release (0.7.5) which has the issue fixed. This has been done in the release 0.8.4 of qubes-mirage-firewall.
The recommended way to upgrade is:
opam update
opam upgrade solo5
Correction details
The following PRs were part of the fix:
- solo5/pull/538 - xen console: update the "to be written" count
- qubes-mirage-firewall/pull/167 - update opam repository commit
Timeline
- 2022-12-04: initial report by Krzysztof Burghardt https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall/issues/166
- 2022-12-04: investigation by Hannes Mehnert and Pierre Alain
- 2022-12-05: initial fix by Pierre Alain https://github.com/Solo5/solo5/pull/538
- 2022-12-05: review of fix by Thomas Leonard
- 2022-12-07: release of fixed packages and security advisory
References
You can find the latest version of this advisory online at https://mirageos.org/blog/MSA03.
This advisory is signed using OpenPGP, you can verify the signature
by downloading our public key from a keyserver (gpg --recv-key 4A732D757C0EDA74),
downloading the raw markdown source of this advisory from
GitHub
and executing gpg --verify 03.txt.asc.