RHSA-2016:2694 - Security Advisory

Topic

An update for systemd is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 Extended Update Support.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Moderate. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.

Description

The systemd packages contain systemd, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with the SysV and LSB init scripts. It provides aggressive parallelism capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, and keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups. In addition, it supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can also work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.

Security Fix(es):

• A flaw was found in the way systemd handled empty notification messages. A local attacker could use this flaw to make systemd freeze its execution, preventing further management of system services, system shutdown, or zombie process collection via systemd. (CVE-2016-7795)

Bug Fix(es):

• Previously, the udev device manager automatically enabled all memory banks on IBM z System installations. As a consequence, hot plug memory was enabled automatically, which was incorrect. With this update, system architecture checks have been added to the udev rules to address the problem. As a result, hot plug memory is no longer automatically enabled. (BZ#1375603)

Solution

For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.2 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.2 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.2 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.2 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.2 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.2 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 7.2 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.2 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 1368374 - [rhel7.2.z] Backport memory leak bug fixes
• BZ - 1375603 - s390x standby memory automatically onlined after boot [rhel-7.2.z]
• BZ - 1380286 - CVE-2016-7795 systemd: Assertion failure when PID 1 receives a zero-length message over notify socket

CVEs

• CVE-2016-7795

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate