RHEL 5 : kvm (RHSA-2009:1659)

high Nessus Plugin ID 63909

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Synopsis

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

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2009:1659 advisory.

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on AMD64 and Intel 64 systems. KVM is a Linux kernel module built for the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel.

On x86 platforms, the do_insn_fetch() function did not limit the amount of instruction bytes fetched per instruction. Users in guest operating systems could leverage this flaw to cause large latencies on SMP hosts that could lead to a local denial of service on the host operating system. This update fixes this issue by imposing the architecturally-defined 15 byte length limit for instructions. (CVE-2009-4031)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* performance problems occurred when using the qcow2 image format with the qemu-kvm -drive cache=none option (the default setting when not specified otherwise). This could cause guest operating system installations to take hours. With this update, performance patches have been backported so that using the qcow2 image format with the cache=none option no longer causes performance issues. (BZ#520693)

* when using the virtual vm8086 mode, bugs in the emulated hardware task switching implementation may have, in some situations, caused older guest operating systems to malfunction. (BZ#532031)

* Windows Server 2003 guests (32-bit) with more than 4GB of memory may have crashed during reboot when using the default qemu-kvm CPU settings.
(BZ#532043)

* with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, guests continued to run after encountering disk read errors. This could have led to their file systems becoming corrupted (but not the host's), notably in environments that use networked storage. With this update, the qemu-kvm -drive werror=stop option now applies not only to write errors but also to read errors: When using this option, guests will pause on disk read and write errors.

By default, guests managed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization use the werror=stop option. This option is not used by default for guests managed by libvirt. (BZ#537334, BZ#540406)

* the para-virtualized block driver (virtio-blk) silently ignored read errors when accessing disk images. With this update, the driver correctly signals the read error to the guest. (BZ#537334)

All KVM users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues. Note: The procedure in the Solution section must be performed before this update will 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 this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Update the RHEL kvm package based on the guidance in RHSA-2009:1659.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 63909

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2009-1659.nasl

Version: 1.15

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 1/24/2013

Updated: 3/20/2025

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: 6.5

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Moderate

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 5.8

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2009-4031

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 8.8

Temporal Score: 7.7

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

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kvm-tools, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kvm, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kmod-kvm, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kvm-qemu-img

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

Patch Publication Date: 12/9/2009

Vulnerability Publication Date: 11/29/2009

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2009-4031

RHSA: 2009:1659

Detections

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