RHEL 7 : kernel (RHSA-2018:1129)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 109115

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Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates for kernel.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2018:1129 advisory.

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

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-2017-5754 relies on the fact that, on impacted microprocessors, during speculative execution of instruction permission faults, exception generation triggered by a faulting access is suppressed until the retirement of the whole instruction block. In a combination with the fact that memory accesses may populate the cache even when the block is being dropped and never committed (executed), an unprivileged local attacker could use this flaw to read privileged (kernel space) memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2017-5754, Important, KVM for Power)

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

Bug Fix(es):

These updated kernel packages include also numerous bug fixes. Space precludes documenting all of these bug fixes in this advisory. See the bug fix descriptions in the related Knowledge Article:
https://access.redhat.com/articles/3413511

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

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

Solution

Update the RHEL kernel package based on the guidance in RHSA-2018:1129.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 109115

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2018-1129.nasl

Version: 1.12

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 4/18/2018

Updated: 4/4/2025

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: 8.1

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.7

Temporal Score: 4.1

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2017-5754

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: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-tools, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-headers, cpe:/o:redhat:rhel_eus:7.3, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-tools-libs-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-bootwrapper, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-tools-libs, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:python-perf, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:perf

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: 4/17/2018

Vulnerability Publication Date: 1/4/2018

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5754

CWE: 200

RHSA: 2018:1129

Detections

Analytics