An update for Xen was just released to address two major security vulnerabilities and it is recommended that you update as soon as possible.
Issue 1:
The PV pagetable code has fast-paths for making updates to pre-existing pagetable entries, to skip expensive re-validation in safe cases (e.g. clearing only Access/Dirty bits). The bits considered safe were too broad, and not actually safe.
A malicous PV guest administrator can escalate their privilege to that of the host.
Issue 2:
Supervisor Mode Access Prevention is a hardware feature designed to make an Operating System more robust, by raising a pagefault rather than accidentally following a pointer into userspace. However, legitimate accesses into userspace require whitelisting, and the exception delivery mechanism for 32bit PV guests wasn’t whitelisted.
A malicious 32-bit PV guest kernel can trigger a safety check, crashing the hypervisor and causing a denial of service to other VMs on the host.
Source: Hostingseclist
