CVE-2026-79603 PUBLISHED

Unconditionally do TLB flushing ahead of page scrubbing

Assigner: XEN
Reserved: 25.08.2026 Published: 08.09.2026 Updated: 08.09.2026

x86 PV guests can free memory pages while still keeping a stale TLB entry pointing to them. A TLB flush is only issued by Xen (if needed) when the page is re-used. Since it's possible for the page to be scrubbed ahead of the TLB flush, there's a window where a PV guest can modify an already scrubbed page.

Product Status

Vendor Xen
Product Xen
Versions Default: unknown
  • Version consult Xen advisory XSA-511 is unknown

Affected Configurations

All Xen versions from 4.13 onwards are vulnerable. Xen versions 4.12 and earlier are not vulnerable as they lack the scrub-domheap command line option.

Only x86 PV guests can exploit the vulnerability.

Workarounds

There is no known mitigation.

Credits

  • This issue was discovered by Roger Pau Monné of AMD. finder

References

Impacts

  • Deployments using `xsm=silo scrub-domheap` with the aim of not allowing the exchange of information amongst guests are not effective in the presence of PV guests.