RHSA-2009:1692 - Security Advisory

Topic

An updated rhev-hypervisor package that fixes security issues and several
bugs is now available.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.

Description

The rhev-hypervisor package provides a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
(RHEV) Hypervisor ISO disk image. The RHEV Hypervisor is a dedicated
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. It includes everything
necessary to run and manage virtual machines: A subset of the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux operating environment and the Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualization Agent.

Note: RHEV Hypervisor is only available for the Intel 64 and AMD64
architectures with virtualization extensions.

A flaw was found in the Realtek r8169 Ethernet driver in the Linux kernel.
pci_unmap_single() presented a memory leak that could lead to IOMMU space
exhaustion and a system crash. An attacker on the local network could
trigger this flaw by using jumbo frames for large amounts of network
traffic. (CVE-2009-3613)

On x86 platforms, the do_insn_fetch() function did not limit the amount of
instruction bytes fetched per instruction. Users in guest operating systems
could leverage this flaw to cause large latencies on SMP hosts that could
lead to a local denial of service on the host operating system. This update
fixes this issue by imposing the architecturally-defined 15 byte length
limit for instructions. (CVE-2009-4031)

This updated package provides updated components that include fixes for
security issues; however, these issues have no security impact for RHEV
Hypervisor. These fixes are for kernel issues CVE-2009-2695, CVE-2009-2908,
CVE-2009-3228, CVE-2009-3286, CVE-2009-3547, CVE-2009-3612, CVE-2009-3620,
CVE-2009-3621, and CVE-2009-3726; acpid issue CVE-2009-4033; expat issues
CVE-2009-3560 and CVE-2009-3720; and wget issue CVE-2009-3490.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• the scsi_dh_rdac driver was updated to recognize the Sun StorageTek

Flexline 380. This driver is now also loaded into initrd to handle passive
paths correctly. Without this initrd change, lots of errors could occur
during boot, increasing boot time. (BZ#545909)

• during the firstboot network configuration of the RHEV Hypervisor, it was

only possible to specify NTP servers by their IP addresses if the RHEV
Hypervisor system was configured with a static IP address. With this
update, hostnames can also be used to specify NTP servers. (BZ#545923)

• with the default settings, performance problems occurred when using the

qcow2 image format. This could cause guest operating system installations
to take hours. With this update, performance patches have been backported
to resolve this issue. (BZ#520693)

• when using the virtual vm8086 mode, bugs in the emulated hardware task

switching implementation may have, in some situations, caused older guest
operating systems to malfunction. (BZ#532031)

• Windows Server 2003 guests (32-bit) with more than 4GB of memory may have

crashed during reboot when using the default RHEV Hypervisor settings.
(BZ#532043)

• guests continued to run after encountering disk read errors. This could

have led to their file systems becoming corrupted (but not the host's),
notably in environments that use networked storage. With this update,
guests will now pause on disk read and write errors. (BZ#537334, BZ#540406)

• the para-virtualized block driver (virtio-blk) silently ignored read

errors when accessing disk images. With this update, the driver correctly
signals the read error to the guest. (BZ#537334)

Users of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor are advised to
upgrade to this updated package, which corrects these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Virtualization 5 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 529137 - CVE-2009-3613 kernel: flood ping cause out-of-iommu error and panic when mtu larger than 1500
• BZ - 541160 - CVE-2009-4031 kernel: KVM: x86 emulator: limit instructions to 15 bytes

CVEs

• CVE-2009-4031
• CVE-2009-3613

References

• http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important
• http://redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_Hypervisor/5.4-2.1/html/RHEV-Hypervisor_Deployment_Guide/