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Red Hat: RHSA-2015:1925-01 Important: KVM Heap Overflow Threat

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Calendar Grey October 22, 2015
Scroller Redhat
KVM security enhancement for Red Hat tackles buffer overflow; essential patches incorporated for improved system safeguarding.
Updated kvm packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

The following procedure must be performed before this update will take effect:

1) Stop all KVM guest virtual machines.

2) Either reboot the hypervisor machine or, as the root user, remove (using "modprobe -r [module]") and reload (using "modprobe [module]") all of the following modules which are currently running (determined using "lsmod"): kvm, ksm, kvm-intel or kvm-amd.

3) Restart the KVM guest virtual machines.

Summary

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on AMD64 and Intel 64 systems.
A heap buffer overflow flaw was found in the way QEMU's NE2000 NIC emulation implementation handled certain packets received over the network. A privileged user inside a guest could use this flaw to crash the QEMU instance (denial of service) or potentially execute arbitrary code on the host. (CVE-2015-5279)
Red Hat would like to thank Qinghao Tang of QIHU 360 Inc. for reporting this issue.
All kvm users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. Note: The procedure in the Solution section must be performed before this update will take effect.

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2015-5279 https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important

Package List

RHEL Desktop Multi OS (v. 5 client):
Source: kvm-83-274.el5_11.src.rpm
x86_64: kmod-kvm-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kmod-kvm-debug-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-debuginfo-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-qemu-img-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-tools-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm
RHEL Virtualization (v. 5 server):
Source: kvm-83-274.el5_11.src.rpm
x86_64: kmod-kvm-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kmod-kvm-debug-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-debuginfo-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-qemu-img-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm kvm-tools-83-274.el5_11.x86_64.rpm
These packages are GPG signed by Red Hat for security. Our key and details on how to verify the signature are available from https://access.redhat.com/security/team/key/


Severity
important
Lowest
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Medium
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Critical

Advisory ID: RHSA-2015:1925-01
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Issue date: 2015-10-22

Topic

Updated kvm packages that fix one security issue are now available for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Important securityimpact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, whichgives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in theReferences section.

Relevant Releases Architectures

RHEL Desktop Multi OS (v. 5 client) - x86_64

RHEL Virtualization (v. 5 server) - x86_64

Bugs Fixed

1256672 - CVE-2015-5279 qemu: Heap overflow vulnerability in ne2000_receive() function

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