RHSA-2018:1196 - Security Advisory

Topic

An update for kernel is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Extended Lifecycle 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.

[Updated 4th September 2019]
The Problem Description text has been updated to fix a list of architectures addressed by the CVE-2017-5715 mitigation. No changes have been made to the packages.

Description

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

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, Important, x86 and x86-64)

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

Bug Fix(es):

• The Return Trampolines (Retpolines) mechanism is a software construct that leverages specific knowledge of the underlying hardware to mitigate the branch target injection, also known as Spectre variant 2 vulnerability described in CVE-2017-5715. With this update, the support for Retpolines has been implemented into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel. (BZ#1535650)

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

The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 5 s390x

Fixes

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

CVEs

• CVE-2017-5715

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