Moderate: openstack-nova security, bug fix, and enhancement update

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2013-1664   CVE-2013-1665   CVE-2013-1665   CVE-2013-1664   CVE-2013-1664   CVE-2013-1665  

Synopsis

Moderate: openstack-nova security, bug fix, and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Moderate

Topic

Updated openstack-nova packages that fix two security issues, several bugs,
and add an enhancement are now available for Red Hat OpenStack Folsom.

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.

Description

The openstack-nova packages provide OpenStack Compute (code name Nova),
which provides services for provisioning, managing, and using virtual
machine instances.

A denial of service flaw was found in the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
parser used by Nova. A remote attacker could use this flaw to send a
specially-crafted request to a Nova API, causing Nova to consume an
excessive amount of CPU and memory. (CVE-2013-1664)

A flaw was found in the XML parser used by Nova. If a remote attacker
sent a specially-crafted request to a Nova API, it could cause Nova to
connect to external entities, causing a large amount of system load, or
allow an attacker to read files on the Nova server that are accessible to
the user running Nova. (CVE-2013-1665)

This update also fixes several bugs. The following are noteworthy changes:

  • In single node, all-in-one environments where all services (such as
    Nova, Glance, and Keystone) are installed and run on a single system, after
    a host reboot, some instances may have automatically started again, but
    soon after, automatically shut down. "Instance shutdown by itself. Calling
    the stop API" messages were logged to Nova logs (in "/var/log/nova/") in
    these cases. (BZ#890512)
  • In environments using Quantum, after creating a network with two
    subnets, removing an IP address (using "nova remove-fixed-ip"), and then
    adding a fixed address (using "nova add-fixed-ip"), resulted in the
    virtual machine having two IP addresses. (BZ#908373)
  • Prior to this update, after converting a downloaded image to raw, the
    original, downloaded image (a large .part file) was not removed. After
    installing this update, the following three options must be configured in
    "/etc/nova/nova.conf" to correctly resolve this issue:

remove_unused_base_images=true
remove_unused_resized_minimum_age_seconds=60
remove_unused_original_minimum_age_seconds=60

(BZ#911103)

Additionally, this update adds the following enhancement:

  • The RHSA-2013:0658 openstack-cinder update implemented a Cinder driver
    that allows Red Hat Storage to be used as a back-end for Cinder volumes.
    This update adds a libvirt connector to Nova, which is a requirement for
    using the new Cinder driver. Note that you must manually install the
    glusterfs and glusterfs-fuse packages on the Nova nodes.

Additionally, when running Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) in Enforcing
mode, the latest selinux-policy packages provided by RHBA-2013:0618 must be
installed, otherwise denials will be logged when attempting to mount Red
Hat Storage volumes. (BZ#912384)

All users of openstack-nova are advised to upgrade to these updated
packages, which correct these issues and add this enhancement. After
installing the updated packages, the Nova running services will be
restarted automatically.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

  • Red Hat OpenStack folsom x86_64

Fixes

  • BZ - 889868 - dnsmasq DHCP request blocked by default firewall rules
  • BZ - 890512 - Some Instances are shutoff after host reboot
  • BZ - 891347 - Use fallocate when copying disk images around in _base to improve copy performance and out of space errors
  • BZ - 891420 - Change default for compute node to poll for database connection indefinitely
  • BZ - 902409 - Network disassociation from a project doesn't work
  • BZ - 905113 - Backport qpid_hosts option - nova
  • BZ - 906783 - Quantum/Nova does not work with nova.virt.firewall.NoopFirewallDriver
  • BZ - 907178 - Deletion of the "default" security group fails without error
  • BZ - 908373 - Quantum: adding fixed ip to an instance on a network with two subnets using NOVA will results with two ip address
  • BZ - 910224 - CVE-2013-1664 CVE-2013-1665 OpenStack nova: XML entity parsing
  • BZ - 911103 - libvirt leaves large stale .part files on disk when downloading non raw images
  • BZ - 912384 - Backport GlusterFS connector from Grizzly
  • BZ - 912982 - CVE-2013-1665 Python xml bindings: External entity expansion in Python XML libraries inflicts potential security flaws and DoS vulnerabilities
  • BZ - 913613 - Some Instances are shutoff after they're suspended externally to nova
  • BZ - 913808 - CVE-2013-1664 Python xml bindings: Internal entity expansion in Python XML libraries inflicts DoS vulnerabilities
  • BZ - 914759 - nova-dhcpbridge does not support nova.conf and nova-dist.conf at the same time
  • BZ - 916241 - nova-dhcpbridge fails to startup

CVEs

References