CVE-2024-53135

About vulnerability

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

KVM: VMX: Bury Intel PT virtualization (guest/host mode) behind CONFIG_BROKEN

Hide KVM’s pt_mode module param behind CONFIG_BROKEN, i.e. disable support for virtualizing Intel PT via guest/host mode unless BROKEN=y. There are myriad bugs in the implementation, some of which are fatal to the guest, and others which put the stability and health of the host at risk.

For guest fatalities, the most glaring issue is that KVM fails to ensure tracing is disabled, and stays disabled prior to VM-Enter, which is necessary as hardware disallows loading (the guest’s) RTIT_CTL if tracing is enabled (enforced via a VMX consistency check). Per the SDM:

If the logical processor is operating with Intel PT enabled (if IA32_RTIT_CTL.TraceEn = 1) at the time of VM entry, the “load IA32_RTIT_CTL” VM-entry control must be 0.

On the host side, KVM doesn’t validate the guest CPUID configuration provided by userspace, and even worse, uses the guest configuration to decide what MSRs to save/load at VM-Enter and VM-Exit. E.g. configuring guest CPUID to enumerate more address ranges than are supported in hardware will result in KVM trying to passthrough, save, and load non-existent MSRs, which generates a variety of WARNs, ToPA ERRORs in the host, a potential deadlock, etc.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

kernel @ 5.14.0-11 (+7 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.