Synopsis

Important: libvirt security and bug fix update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for libvirt is now available 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 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 that includes support for guests running on hosts with AMD processors.

Red Hat would like to thank Ken Johnson (Microsoft Security Response Center) and Jann Horn (Google Project Zero) for reporting this issue.

Bug Fix(es):

• Previously, the virtlogd service logged redundant AVC denial errors when a guest virtual machine was started. With this update, the virtlogd service no longer attempts to send shutdown inhibition calls to systemd, which prevents the described errors from occurring. (BZ#1573268)
• Prior to this update, guest virtual machine actions that use a python library in some cases failed and "Hash operation not allowed during iteration" error messages were logged. Several redundant thread access checks have been removed, and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#1581364)
• The "virsh capabilities" command previously displayed an inaccurate number of 4 KiB memory pages on systems with very large amounts of memory. This update optimizes the memory diagnostic mechanism to ensure memory page numbers are displayed correctly on such systems. (BZ#1582418)

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 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 7.5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 7 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.7 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 7 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.7 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.5 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Virtualization 4 for RHEL 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Gluster Storage Server for On-premise 3 for RHEL 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Virtualization for IBM Power LE 4 for RHEL 7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian 7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.6 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.5 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM 64 7 aarch64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power 9 7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (for IBM Power LE) - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.7 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (for IBM Power LE) - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.6 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM System z (Structure A) 7 s390x

Fixes

• BZ - 1566890 - CVE-2018-3639 hw: cpu: speculative store bypass
• BZ - 1573268 - Got lots OVS daemon ERRs while starting a OVS-dpdk guest [rhel-7.5.z]
• BZ - 1581364 - Hash operation not allowed during iteration [rhel-7.5.z]
• BZ - 1582418 - virsh capabilities reports invalid values for 4K pages [rhel-7.5.z]

CVEs

• CVE-2018-3639

References