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RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2013:1790)

low Nessus Plugin ID 71242

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Synopsis

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

Description

Updated kernel packages that fix one security issue and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

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

* An information leak flaw was found in the way the Xen hypervisor handled error conditions when reading guest memory during certain guest-originated operations, such as port or memory mapped I/O writes.
A privileged user in a fully-virtualized guest could use this flaw to leak hypervisor stack memory to a guest. (CVE-2013-4355, Moderate)

Red Hat would like to thank the Xen project for reporting this issue.

This update also fixes the following bugs :

* A previous fix to the kernel did not contain a memory barrier in the percpu_up_write() function. Consequently, under certain circumstances, a race condition could occur leading to memory corruption and a subsequent kernel panic. This update introduces a new memory barrier pair, light_mb() and heavy_mb(), for per-CPU basis read and write semaphores (percpu-rw-semaphores) ensuring that the race condition can no longer occur. In addition, the read path performance of 'percpu-rw-semaphores' has been improved. (BZ#1014715)

* Due to a bug in the tg3 driver, systems that had the Wake-on-LAN (WOL) feature enabled on their NICs could not have been woken up from suspension or hibernation using WOL. A missing pci_wake_from_d3() function call has been added to the tg3 driver, which ensures that WOL functions properly by setting the PME_ENABLE bit. (BZ#1014973)

* Due to an incorrect test condition in the mpt2sas driver, the driver was unable to catch failures to map a SCSI scatter-gather list. The test condition has been corrected so that the mpt2sas driver now handles SCSI scatter-gather mapping failures as expected. (BZ#1018458)

* A previous patch to the kernel introduced the 'VLAN tag re-insertion' workaround to resolve a problem with incorrectly handled VLAN-tagged packets with no assigned VLAN group while the be2net driver was in promiscuous mode. However, this solution led to packet corruption and a subsequent kernel oops if such a processed packed was a GRO packet. Therefore, a patch has been applied to restrict VLAN tag re-insertion only to non-GRO packets. The be2net driver now processes VLAN-tagged packets with no assigned VLAN group correctly in this situation. (BZ#1023348)

All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

Solution

Update the affected packages.

See Also

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013:1790

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2013-4355

Plugin Details

Severity: Low

ID: 71242

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2013-1790.nasl

Version: 1.13

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 12/6/2013

Updated: 1/14/2021

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Low

Base Score: 1.5

Temporal Score: 1.1

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-pae, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-doc, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-pae-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-xen-devel, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-headers, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debuginfo-common, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-pae-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-xen-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-xen

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

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 12/5/2013

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2013-4355

BID: 62708

RHSA: 2013:1790