The WRMSR processing functionality in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel through 3.17.2 does not properly handle the writing of a non-canonical address to a model-specific register, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) by leveraging guest OS privileges, related to the wrmsr_interception function in arch/x86/kvm/svm.c and the handle_wrmsr function in arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c.

The WRMSR processing functionality in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel through 3.17.2 does not properly handle the writing of a non-canonical address to a model-specific register, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) by leveraging guest OS privileges, related to the wrmsr_interception function in arch/x86/kvm/svm.c and the handle_wrmsr function in arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c.

kernel: kvm: noncanonical MSR writes kernel: kvm: PIT timer race condition

Security update for Linux kernel

Affected: Ubuntu:14.04:LTS: linux

The WRMSR processing functionality in the KVM subsystem in the Linux kernel through 3.17.2 does not properly handle the writing of a non-canonical address to a model-specific register, which allows guest OS users to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) by leveraging guest OS privileges, related to the wrmsr_interception function in arch/x86/kvm/svm.c and the handle_wrmsr function in arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c. A privileged guest user can use this flaw to crash the host. Enabling CONFIG_PARAVIRT when building the kernel mitigates this issue because wrmsrl() ends up invoking safe msr write variant.