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 6.2 Advanced Update Support.

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 - AUS 6.2 x86_64

Fixes

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

CVEs

(none)

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important
• https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2017-5715

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 6.2

SRPM
qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.209.el6_2.6.src.rpm	SHA-256: d432085a21ce7b94ccd27a3f95ec74056e38aa15cd77ef1fca39262b26d5fe9e
x86_64
qemu-img-0.12.1.2-2.209.el6_2.6.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: 3a3aeb73e52a4350744051c0971938d7e805d16f0a2426be499d60e9586c1423
qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.209.el6_2.6.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: 4c720b11574168c8aa6c00078b7ae5026bb4c425b68a435a9d4dc6c3e5c036c7
qemu-kvm-debuginfo-0.12.1.2-2.209.el6_2.6.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: 4de259d86a15cb0c694fe6d3a1fd5000cf0d7b14bfd832f4d3eb1cb742a7e886
qemu-kvm-tools-0.12.1.2-2.209.el6_2.6.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: b43210917e959af09e453358ef3a40e709996374c5a102053e2a49fc0d4b6a65