Xen Patches Cross-Guest Data Leak on AMD Zen1 CPUs
Xen disclosed XSA-488, a transient execution vulnerability named Floating Point Divider State Sampling that affects x86 deployments running on vulnerable AMD Fam17h (Zen1) processors. The flaw was identified by researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and Xen said an attacker may be able to infer data from other execution contexts, including other guest VMs, creating a cross-tenant confidentiality risk for virtualized environments.
According to the advisory, all Xen versions are affected when deployed on the impacted CPU family. Xen said no mitigations are currently available, but released fixes for xen-unstable and the supported 4.20/4.19, 4.18, and 4.17 branches, urging operators on affected hardware to apply the relevant patches to reduce exposure.
Timeline
Apr 17, 2026
Xen discloses XSA-488 and releases patches
Xen published Security Advisory 488, stating that all Xen versions are affected on vulnerable CPUs and that attackers may be able to infer data from other contexts, including other guests. Xen also released patches for xen-unstable and the Xen 4.20/4.19, 4.18, and 4.17 branches, while noting that no mitigations were available.
Apr 17, 2026
CISPA researchers discover Xen FP Divider State Sampling issue
Researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security identified a new transient execution vulnerability dubbed Floating Point Divider State Sampling affecting Xen on x86 systems running on AMD Fam17h CPUs based on the Zen1 microarchitecture.
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