Synopsis

Important: qemu-kvm security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for qemu-kvm is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

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

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on a variety of architectures. The qemu-kvm packages provide the user-space component for running virtual machines that use KVM.

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 qemu-kvm side of the CVE-2018-3639 mitigation.

• QEMU: cirrus: OOB access when updating VGA display (CVE-2018-7858)
• QEMU: vga: OOB read access during display update (CVE-2017-13672)
• Qemu: Out-of-bounds read in vga_draw_text routine (CVE-2018-5683)

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 Ken Johnson (Microsoft Security Response Center) and Jann Horn (Google Project Zero) for reporting CVE-2018-3639; Ross Lagerwall (Citrix.com) for reporting CVE-2018-7858; David Buchanan for reporting CVE-2017-13672; and Jiang Xin and Lin ZheCheng for reporting CVE-2018-5683.

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 this update, shut down all running virtual machines. Once all virtual machines have shut down, start them again for this update to take effect.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 1486560 - CVE-2017-13672 QEMU: vga: OOB read access during display update
• BZ - 1530356 - CVE-2018-5683 Qemu: Out-of-bounds read in vga_draw_text routine
• BZ - 1553402 - CVE-2018-7858 QEMU: cirrus: OOB access when updating VGA display
• BZ - 1566890 - CVE-2018-3639 hw: cpu: speculative store bypass

CVEs

• CVE-2017-13672
• CVE-2018-3639
• CVE-2018-5683
• CVE-2018-7858

References