Topic

An update for systemd is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Moderate. 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 systemd packages contain systemd, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with the SysV and LSB init scripts. It provides aggressive parallelism capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, and keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups. In addition, it supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can also work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.

Security Fix(es):

• systemd: line splitting via fgets() allows for state injection during daemon-reexec (CVE-2018-15686)
• systemd: out-of-bounds read when parsing a crafted syslog message (CVE-2018-16866)
• systemd: kills privileged process if unprivileged PIDFile was tampered (CVE-2018-16888)

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

Additional Changes:

For detailed information on changes in this release, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 Release Notes linked from the References section.

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 Enterprise Linux Server 7 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 Power, big endian 7 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian 7 ppc64le

Fixes

• BZ - 1267552 - systemd-journal-remote fails with a cryptic error message if output file doesn't have extension .journal
• BZ - 1272485 - Difference in multilib ppc64 and ppc in case of intltool translation
• BZ - 1463678 - Cannot use "-b" and "-D" parameters to journalctl command simultaneously
• BZ - 1585913 - systemd backport fix for nofile improvements in containerized environments
• BZ - 1619543 - Assertion failure when system journal rotation fails
• BZ - 1631625 - [RHEL7.6]hostnamectl set-hostname fail with 63 characters hostname
• BZ - 1639071 - CVE-2018-15686 systemd: line splitting via fgets() allows for state injection during daemon-reexec
• BZ - 1641764 - Backport patch to allow tmpfiles e directive to accept glob-style wildcards
• BZ - 1643172 - escaped systemd unit returns wrongly escaped (and different) Id
• BZ - 1651257 - access to automounted dir with expiration time set can hang
• BZ - 1653867 - CVE-2018-16866 systemd: out-of-bounds read when parsing a crafted syslog message
• BZ - 1660422 - rescue.service announces itself as emergency mode, not rescue mode.
• BZ - 1662867 - CVE-2018-16888 systemd: kills privileged process if unprivileged PIDFile was tampered
• BZ - 1663365 - systemd-networkd ignores UseRoutes=false in [DHCP] of .network file
• BZ - 1666612 - Rules "uname -p" and "systemd-detect-virt" kill the system boot time on large systems
• BZ - 1691511 - Repeated systemd-run --scope -- mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /<path> under directories bind-mounted to themselves result in E2BIG failures
• BZ - 1693559 - sd-bus: deal with cookie overruns
• BZ - 1693716 - core/shutdown.c: in_container is used before it is defined
• BZ - 1697909 - [RHEL7.7] Failed to start udev Wait for Complete Device Initialization.

CVEs

• CVE-2018-15686
• CVE-2018-16866
• CVE-2018-16888

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate
• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.7_release_notes/index