RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2015:0783)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 82637

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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 5 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2015:0783 advisory.

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

* It was found that the Linux kernel's Infiniband subsystem did not properly sanitize input parameters while registering memory regions from user space via the (u)verbs API. A local user with access to a /dev/infiniband/uverbsX device could use this flaw to crash the system or, potentially, escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2014-8159, Important)

* An insufficient bound checking flaw was found in the Xen hypervisor's implementation of acceleration support for the REP MOVS instructions.
A privileged HVM guest user could potentially use this flaw to crash the host. (CVE-2014-8867, Important)

Red Hat would like to thank Mellanox for reporting CVE-2014-8159, and the Xen project for reporting CVE-2014-8867.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* Under memory pressure, cached data was previously flushed to the backing server using the PID of the thread responsible for flushing the data in the Server Message Block (SMB) headers instead of the PID of the thread which actually wrote the data. As a consequence, when a file was locked by the writing thread prior to writing, the server considered writes by the thread flushing the pagecache as being a separate process from writing to a locked file, and thus rejected the writes. In addition, the data to be written was discarded. This update ensures that the correct PID is sent to the server, and data corruption is avoided when data is being written from a client under memory pressure. (BZ#1169304)

* This update adds support for new cryptographic hardware in toleration mode for IBM System z. (BZ#1182522)

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.

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-2015:0783.

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 82637

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2015-0783.nasl

Version: 1.11

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 4/8/2015

Updated: 11/4/2024

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: High

Score: 7.3

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.9

Temporal Score: 5.1

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2014-8159

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 10

Temporal Score: 8.7

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

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2014-8867

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-xen-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-pae, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-headers, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-pae-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug, 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: 4/7/2015

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2014-8159, CVE-2014-8867

BID: 71331, 73060

CWE: 190

RHSA: 2015:0783

Detections

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