Reported to security but was also entered into public bz at http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1068 ... Pygrub is a Xen utility which emulates the Grub bootloader such that boot parameters of a guest domain can be configured from inside that guest domain. Pygrub is distributed with Xen. When booting a guest domain, pygrub uses Python exec() statements to process untrusted data from grub.conf. By crafting a grub.conf file, the root user in a guest domain can trigger execution of arbitrary Python code in domain 0. The offending code is in xen/tools/pygrub/src/GrubConf.py, in lines such as exec("%s = r\"%s\"" %(self.commands[com], arg.strip())) This can be exploited from within a guest domain, for example by modifying /boot/grub/grub.conf and changing the 'default' statement into something like default "+str(0*os.system(" insert evil command here "))+" On the next boot of the guest domain, the evil command will execute in domain 0. Whether this is a security problem depends on how Xen is used. It definitely is a problem in the case where pygrub is used to boot a guest domain while system administration of that guest domain is delegated to an untrusted party. ...