CVE-2015-5166

Description

A flaw has been found in the QEMU emulator built with IDE Emulation PCI PIIX3/4 support; the emulator is vulnerable to a use-after-free flaw, while writing data to an I/O port inside a guest. This issue is specific to the Xen platform. A privileged(CAP_SYS_RAWIO) guest user on the Xen platform could use this flaw to crash the QEMU instance or attempt to make a guest escape to QEMU-process privileges.

Statement

This issue does not affect the versions of kvm and xen packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This issue does not affect the versions of the qemu-kvm packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

This issue does not affect the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 based versions of qemu-kvm-rhev packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.

This issue does not affect the versions of the qemu-kvm packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

This issue does not affect the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 based versions of the qemu-kvm-rhev packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.

This issue does not affect the qemu-kvm-rhev packages as shipped with any currently supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.

CVSS v2 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score2.97.2N/A
Attack VectorAdjacent NetworkLocalN/A
Access ComplexityMediumLowN/A
AuthenticationNoneNoneN/A
Confidentiality ImpactNoneCompleteN/A
Integrity ImpactNoneCompleteN/A
Availability ImpactPartialCompleteN/A

Vector

Red Hat: AV:A/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

NVD: AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Integrity

Technical Impact: Modify Memory

The use of previously freed memory may corrupt valid data, if the memory area in question has been allocated and used properly elsewhere.

Availability

Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart

If chunk consolidation occurs after the use of previously freed data, the process may crash when invalid data is used as chunk information.

Confidentiality

Technical Impact: Read Memory

Read operations on freed memory can sometimes leak sensitive information instead of causing a crash

Integrity,Confidentiality,Availability

Technical Impact: Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands

If malicious data is entered before chunk consolidation can take place, it may be possible to take advantage of a write-what-where primitive to execute arbitrary code. If the newly allocated data happens to hold a class, in C++ for example, various function pointers may be scattered within the heap data. If one of these function pointers is overwritten with an address to valid shellcode, execution of arbitrary code can be achieved.

Acknowledgements

Red Hat would like to thank Xen project for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Donghai Zhu (Alibaba) as the original reporter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Want to get errata notifications? Sign up here.