RHSA-2021:1611 - Security Advisory

Topic

An update for systemd is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

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: Spoofing of XDG_SEAT allows for actions to be checked against "allow_active" instead of "allow_any" (CVE-2019-3842)
• systemd: Mishandles numerical usernames beginning with decimal digits or 0x followed by hexadecimal digits (CVE-2020-13776)

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 8.4 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 for x86_64 8 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 8.8 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 8.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Extended Update Support 8.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 8.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 8.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 8 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 8.8 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 8.6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 8.4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian 8 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 8.8 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 8.6 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 8.4 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 8.8 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 8.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 8.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM 64 8 aarch64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM 64 - Extended Update Support 8.8 aarch64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM 64 - Extended Update Support 8.6 aarch64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM 64 - Extended Update Support 8.4 aarch64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for Power LE - Update Services for SAP Solutions 8.8 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for Power LE - Update Services for SAP Solutions 8.6 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for Power LE - Update Services for SAP Solutions 8.4 ppc64le
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 8.8 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 8.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64 - Update Services for SAP Solutions 8.4 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 1668521 - CVE-2019-3842 systemd: Spoofing of XDG_SEAT allows for actions to be checked against "allow_active" instead of "allow_any"
• BZ - 1740657 - [RFE] NUMA aware CPU affinity setting in systemd unit files
• BZ - 1755287 - localectl set-locale should issue an error message when trying to set a nonexistent locale
• BZ - 1764282 - systemd[XXXXX]: Failed to connect to API bus: Connection refused
• BZ - 1812972 - backport request: allow instantiated units to be enabled via presets
• BZ - 1819868 - systemd excessively reads mountinfo and udev is dense OpenShift environments
• BZ - 1845534 - CVE-2020-13776 systemd: Mishandles numerical usernames beginning with decimal digits or 0x followed by hexadecimal digits
• BZ - 1862714 - LIBSYSTEMD_VERSION value format change crashes systemd-python pip install
• BZ - 1865840 - systemd-tmpfiles request for backport
• BZ - 1868831 - FreezerState is incorrectly updated on system running cgroup v1
• BZ - 1868877 - Enabling the smack feature on the host may cause the container to fail to start
• BZ - 1870638 - RFE: Add an option to Socket units to clear the data before listening again
• BZ - 1871139 - [systemd] systemd-resolved.service:33: Unknown lvalue 'ProtectSystems' in section 'Service'
• BZ - 1880270 - "Failed to start user service, ignoring" when masking user@.service
• BZ - 1885553 - "systemd --user" can dump core upon session closing
• BZ - 1887181 - Backport PassPacketInfo= support into systemd of RHEL 8
• BZ - 1888912 - SELinux policy change not visible to systemd until daemon-reexec
• BZ - 1889996 - backport vconsole-setup: downgrade log message when setting font fails on dummy console

CVEs

• CVE-2019-3842
• CVE-2020-13776

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate
• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/8.4_release_notes/