Bug 2394627 (CVE-2025-40300) - CVE-2025-40300 kernel: x86/vmscape: Add conditional IBPB mitigation
Summary: CVE-2025-40300 kernel: x86/vmscape: Add conditional IBPB mitigation
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2025-40300
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2025-09-11 17:03 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2025-10-14 14:49 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:
Embargoed:


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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2025-09-11 17:03:18 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/vmscape: Add conditional IBPB mitigation

VMSCAPE is a vulnerability that exploits insufficient branch predictor
isolation between a guest and a userspace hypervisor (like QEMU). Existing
mitigations already protect kernel/KVM from a malicious guest. Userspace
can additionally be protected by flushing the branch predictors after a
VMexit.

Since it is the userspace that consumes the poisoned branch predictors,
conditionally issue an IBPB after a VMexit and before returning to
userspace. Workloads that frequently switch between hypervisor and
userspace will incur the most overhead from the new IBPB.

This new IBPB is not integrated with the existing IBPB sites. For
instance, a task can use the existing speculation control prctl() to
get an IBPB at context switch time. With this implementation, the
IBPB is doubled up: one at context switch and another before running
userspace.

The intent is to integrate and optimize these cases post-embargo.

[ dhansen: elaborate on suboptimal IBPB solution ]


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