RHSA-2018:1346 - Security Advisory

Topic

An update for kernel is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 Extended 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 kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

Security Fix(es):

• hw: cpu: speculative execution permission faults handling (CVE-2017-5754, x86 32-bit)
• Kernel: error in exception handling leads to DoS (CVE-2018-8897)

For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, and other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.

Red Hat would like to thank Google Project Zero for reporting CVE-2017-5754 and Nick Peterson (Everdox Tech LLC) and Andy Lutomirski for reporting CVE-2018-8897.

Bug Fix(es):

• The kernel build requirements have been updated to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compiler version that has the support for Retpolines. The 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. (BZ#1554253)

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 for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 6.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 6.7 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 6.7 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 6.7 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 6.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 6.7 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 1519781 - CVE-2017-5754 hw: cpu: speculative execution permission faults handling
• BZ - 1567074 - CVE-2018-8897 Kernel: error in exception handling leads to DoS

CVEs

• CVE-2017-5715
• CVE-2017-5754
• CVE-2018-8897

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important
• https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/pop_ss
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2017-5754
• https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution