The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2018:0023 advisory.

    Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on a variety of     architectures. The qemu-kvm package provides the user-space component for running virtual machines that     use KVM.

    Security Fix(es):

    * An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented     speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary     variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. Variant     CVE-2017-5715 triggers the speculative execution by utilizing branch target injection. It relies on the     presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that     memory accesses may cause allocation into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed     instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this     flaw to cross the syscall and guest/host boundaries and read privileged memory by conducting targeted     cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2017-5715)

    Note: This is the qemu-kvm side of the CVE-2017-5715 mitigation.

    Red Hat would like to thank Google Project Zero for reporting this issue.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Detections

Analytics

RHEL 7 : qemu-kvm (RHSA-2018:0023)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 105564

Version 3.22

Version 3.21

Version 3.22 Mar 20, 2025, 7:47 AM CVSS metrics ("Cvssv4 score" set to 0.0) CVSSv2 score source (set to "CVE-2017-5715") CVSSv2 severity (based on None, severity decreased from "High" to "Low") Detection (updated detection logic) Plugin metadata Reference Plugin Feed: 202503200747
Version 3.21 Aug 11, 2023, 10:11 AM IAVM reference Plugin Feed: 202308111011