Synopsis

Important: libvirt security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for libvirt 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

The libvirt library contains a C API for managing and interacting with the virtualization capabilities of Linux and other operating systems. In addition, libvirt provides tools for remote management of virtualized systems.

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 libvirt 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 the updated packages, libvirtd will be restarted automatically.

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
libvirt-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.src.rpm	SHA-256: aa133dbab1997c894ef6326125847d60ded4348148ecad61ae0223e8985dc689
x86_64
libvirt-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: b1e418c1802dbcb5b070f206f20e25b2256a3c9280e24d944d76ebc9e39eb536
libvirt-client-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.i686.rpm	SHA-256: ea804f424fd0263cfdab4821075f6399c2bb364644da67d4079b2339f9086642
libvirt-client-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: 28b79b769dd272efeb8d21e35d9c262f895085c8e64bc2c1085da8890c9fa739
libvirt-debuginfo-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.i686.rpm	SHA-256: 827668b9494c24c4790be6136109ad26bbd8a252924457d5ddd09331f78551e9
libvirt-debuginfo-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: a4b0bbf4e47d78ece013fe76297e23fd52ea4c9c3bcbe6eb29aa1000eb079e43
libvirt-debuginfo-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: a4b0bbf4e47d78ece013fe76297e23fd52ea4c9c3bcbe6eb29aa1000eb079e43
libvirt-devel-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.i686.rpm	SHA-256: 16bd756dcc784ae0abef6f2e30e1c6536851a054e506e973720b0bfce6eebf8f
libvirt-devel-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: 6a01f040a33b8aba609d754f0502e199cacdb30fc0ccbe28a399621fe0a43bc1
libvirt-lock-sanlock-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: a95806f4585de4027fd55a962f213278d9c0627e011b8e7727246402dc29a236
libvirt-python-0.9.4-23.el6_2.11.x86_64.rpm	SHA-256: e08507b4eb99de990d7f350002b443f34aef738c8ec3f2ab74a5ad26047a7dc0