Synopsis

Important: vdsm security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for vdsm is now available for Red Hat Virtualization 4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

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 VDSM service is required by a Virtualization Manager to manage the Linux hosts. VDSM manages and monitors the host's storage, memory and networks as well as virtual machine creation, other host administration tasks, statistics gathering, and log collection.

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 VDSM 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

Affected Products

• Red Hat Virtualization 4 for RHEL 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Virtualization for IBM Power LE 4 for RHEL 7 ppc64le

Fixes

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

CVEs

• CVE-2018-3639

References