CVE-2026-79609
HighCVSS 8.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk5th percentile - higher than 5% of all known CVEs
Summary
The vulnerability in Xen concerns the XPTI (Xen Page Table Isolation) mechanism, which copies PV guest page table entries from guest-chosen root page tables to the Xen-chosen one. PV guests may have a directmap that does not cover all memory, especially when memory extends beyond the 5 TiB (or 3.5 TiB with CONFIG_BIGMEM=y) address boundary.
Risk Assessment
This could lead to incorrect isolation behavior, potentially enabling Meltdown-type attacks or data confidentiality compromise.
Recommendation
Apply the patch from the Xen vendor that addresses this issue and update the system to a patched version.
Other vulnerabilities in Xen
See all- CVE-2026-62436Medium
When switching from Grant Table v2 to v1 in Xen, code holding the grant table lock but temporarily dropping and re-acquiring it wrongly assumes that table properties won't change during the window without the lock. This leads to issues with status frames that disappear when switching from v2 to v1.
- CVE-2026-62435Medium
When switching from Grant Table v1 to v2 in Xen, code holding the grant table lock but temporarily dropping and re-acquiring it wrongly assumes that table properties won't change during the window without the lock. This leads to a reduction in the number of valid grant references.
- CVE-2026-62434Medium
A guest with Populated on Demand (PoD) enabled may attempt to reclaim pages that are not regular guest RAM. This can cause corruption of memory management state in Xen.
- CVE-2026-62432High
The EVTCHNOP_expand_array hypercall checks for FIFO event channels being enabled, but without holding the correct lock. It can race with EVTCHNOP_reset, resulting in dereferencing a NULL pointer.
- CVE-2026-62431High
The logic to handle periodic Viridian STIMERs performs a division with an unchecked user-controlled divisor value, that can be set to zero to cause a #DE fault.
- CVE-2026-62430High
Accesses to CMOS memory contents are done using an indirect IO port pair. Xen needs to cache the guest chosen index, and one of the usages of the index didn't take the necessary locking to avoid concurrent changes, allowing a guest to change the index after it being checked, causing an out-of-bound read access.
- CVE-2026-62429Medium
Accessing vNUMA configuration data of a guest is still possible when domain destruction has already started. The cleanup of that configuration information is not synchronized with its retrieval by a device model controlling the guest.
- CVE-2026-62428High
When grant-copy operations are processed, permission checks may be carried out on a page different from the one involved in the copy when the grant is already pinned, leading to inconsistency.
- CVE-2026-62427High
Platform-op operations use a system-wide lock, but the lock acquisition lacks fairness, and with XSM/Flask enabled, the lock is acquired before permission checks. This is the platform-op issue.
- CVE-2026-62426High
Sysctl operations use a system-wide lock, but the lock acquisition lacks fairness, and with XSM/Flask enabled, the lock is acquired before permission checks. This is the sysctl issue.
Original NVD description (English source)
XPTI (Xen Page Table Isolation) was introduced to mitigate Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754, one aspect of XSA-254). This involves copying 64-bit PV guest page table entries from guest-chosen root page tables to the Xen- chosen one which is in actual use by hardware. To read the guest root page table, the directmap is used. PV guests, however, have a directmap which may not cover all memory; in particular this is the case if any memory extends beyond the 5 TiB (CONFIG_BIGMEM=y: 3.5 TiB) address boundary.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

