Ubuntu 11.10 USN-1339-1: Critical QEMU Denial of Service Risk

ubuntu

January 23, 2012

A remote attacker could cause QEMU to crash.

Summary

A remote attacker could cause QEMU to crash.

Software Description:

- qemu-kvm: Machine emulator and virtualizer

Details:

Nicolae Mogoreanu discovered that QEMU did not properly verify legacy mode

packets in the e1000 network driver. A remote attacker could exploit this

to cause a denial of service or possibly execute code with the privileges

of the user invoking the program.

When using QEMU with libvirt or virtualization management software based on

libvirt such as Eucalyptus and OpenStack, QEMU guests are individually

isolated by an AppArmor profile by default in Ubuntu.

Topics Covered

security advisory remote attack Ubuntu Denial of Service qemu-kvm

Update Instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following
package versions:

Ubuntu 11.10:
  qemu-kvm                        0.14.1+noroms-0ubuntu6.2

Ubuntu 11.04:
  qemu-kvm                        0.14.0+noroms-0ubuntu4.5

Ubuntu 10.10:
  qemu-kvm                        0.12.5+noroms-0ubuntu7.11
  qemu-kvm-extras                 0.12.5+noroms-0ubuntu7.11
  qemu-kvm-extras-static          0.12.5+noroms-0ubuntu7.11

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS:
  qemu-kvm                        0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.17
  qemu-kvm-extras                 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.17
  qemu-kvm-extras-static          0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.17

After a standard system update you need to restart running virtual machines
which use the e1000 network driver to make all the necessary changes.