Synopsis

Important: qemu-kvm security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for qemu-kvm is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. 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

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on a variety of architectures. The qemu-kvm package provides the user-space component for running virtual machines that use KVM.

Security Fix(es):

• An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. Variant CVE-2017-5715 triggers the speculative execution by utilizing branch target injection. It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory accesses may cause allocation into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to cross the syscall and guest/host boundaries and read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2017-5715)

Note: This is the qemu-kvm side of the CVE-2017-5715 mitigation.

Red Hat would like to thank Google Project Zero for reporting this issue.

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

After installing this update, shut down all running virtual machines. Once all virtual machines have shut down, start them again for this update to take effect.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 1519780 - CVE-2017-5715 hw: cpu: speculative execution branch target injection

CVEs

(none)

References