Xen PV Guest Non-SELFSNOOP CPU Memory Corruption
Posted on 06 July 2022
On CPUs without SELFSNOOP support, a Xen PV domain that has access to a PCI device (which grants the domain the ability to set arbitrary cache attributes on all its pages) can trick Xen into validating an L2 pagetable that contains a cacheline that is marked as clean in the cache but actually differs from main memory. After the pagetable has been validated, an attacker can flush the "clean" cacheline, such that on the next load, unvalidated data from main memory shows up in the pagetable.
