RHEL 7 : qemu-kvm (RHSA-2018:0027)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 105567

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Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing a security update for qemu-kvm.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2018:0027 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.

Solution

Update the RHEL qemu-kvm package based on the guidance in RHSA-2018:0027.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 105567

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2018-0027.nasl

Version: 3.18

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 1/4/2018

Updated: 3/24/2025

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: High

Score: 7.6

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Low

Base Score: 1.9

Temporal Score: 1.7

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2017-5715

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.6

Temporal Score: 5.4

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:H/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:redhat:rhel_eus:7.3, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:qemu-img, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:qemu-kvm-tools, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:qemu-kvm, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:qemu-kvm-common

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 1/4/2018

Vulnerability Publication Date: 1/4/2018

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2017-5715

CWE: 200

IAVA: 2018-A-0017-S, 2018-A-0020

RHSA: 2018:0027

Detections

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