Synopsis

Important: libvirt security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for libvirt is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 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 Load & Store instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory read from address to which a recent memory write has occurred may see an older value and subsequently cause an update 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 read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2018-3639)

Note: This is the libvirt side of the CVE-2018-3639 mitigation.

Red Hat would like to thank Ken Johnson (Microsoft Security Response Center) and Jann Horn (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 6.5 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 1566890 - CVE-2018-3639 hw: cpu: speculative store bypass

CVEs

• CVE-2018-3639

References