CentOS 7 : qemu-kvm (CESA-2018:1633) (Spectre)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 109960

Synopsis

The remote CentOS host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

An update for qemu-kvm is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on a variety of architectures. The qemu-kvm packages provide 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 Load & Store instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory read from address to which a recent memory write has occurred may see an older value and subsequently cause an update 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 read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2018-3639)

Note: This is the qemu-kvm side of the CVE-2018-3639 mitigation.

Red Hat would like to thank Ken Johnson (Microsoft Security Response Center) and Jann Horn (Google Project Zero) for reporting this issue.

Solution

Update the affected qemu-kvm packages.

See Also

http://www.nessus.org/u?eec1b57b

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 109960

File Name: centos_RHSA-2018-1633.nasl

Version: 1.13

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 5/23/2018

Updated: 4/15/2021

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.7

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Low

Base Score: 2.1

Temporal Score: 1.6

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2018-3639

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.5

Temporal Score: 5

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

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:centos:centos:7, p-cpe:/a:centos:centos:qemu-kvm-common, p-cpe:/a:centos:centos:qemu-img, p-cpe:/a:centos:centos:qemu-kvm-tools, p-cpe:/a:centos:centos:qemu-kvm

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

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 5/22/2018

Vulnerability Publication Date: 5/22/2018

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2018-3639

RHSA: 2018:1633