RHEL 5 : xen (RHSA-2009:0003)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 35300

Synopsis

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

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2009:0003 advisory.

The xen packages contain the Xen tools and management daemons needed to manage virtual machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Xen was found to allow unprivileged DomU domains to overwrite xenstore values which should only be changeable by the privileged Dom0 domain. An attacker controlling a DomU domain could, potentially, use this flaw to kill arbitrary processes in Dom0 or trick a Dom0 user into accessing the text console of a different domain running on the same host. This update makes certain parts of the xenstore tree read-only to the unprivileged DomU domains. (CVE-2008-4405)

It was discovered that the qemu-dm.debug script created a temporary file in /tmp in an insecure way. A local attacker in Dom0 could, potentially, use this flaw to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack. Note: This script is not needed in production deployments and therefore was removed and is not shipped with updated xen packages. (CVE-2008-4993)

This update also fixes the following bug:

* xen calculates its running time by adding the hypervisor's up-time to the hypervisor's boot-time record. In live migrations of para-virtualized guests, however, the guest would over-write the new hypervisor's boot-time record with the boot-time of the previous hypervisor. This caused time-dependent processes on the guests to fail (for example, crond would fail to start cron jobs). With this update, the new hypervisor's boot-time record is no longer over-written during live migrations.

All xen users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues. The Xen host must be restarted for the update to take effect.

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 xen package based on the guidance in RHSA-2009:0003.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 35300

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2009-0003.nasl

Version: 1.25

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 1/7/2009

Updated: 11/4/2024

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.8

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Moderate

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.2

Temporal Score: 5.6

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2008-4405

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:N/I:H/A:N

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2008-4993

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen-libs

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: 1/7/2009

Vulnerability Publication Date: 10/3/2008

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2008-4405, CVE-2008-4993

CWE: 377

RHSA: 2009:0003

Detections

Analytics