Synopsis
Important: kernel-rt security and bug fix update
Type/Severity
Security Advisory: Important
Topic
An update for kernel-rt is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.
Description
The kernel-rt packages provide the Real Time Linux Kernel, which enables fine-tuning for systems with extremely high determinism requirements.
Security Fix(es):
- Linux kernel built with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (CONFIG_KVM) support is vulnerable to a null pointer dereference flaw. It could occur on x86 platform, when emulating an undefined instruction. An attacker could use this flaw to crash the host kernel resulting in DoS. (CVE-2016-8630, Important)
- A race condition issue leading to a use-after-free flaw was found in the way the raw packet sockets implementation in the Linux kernel networking subsystem handled synchronization while creating the TPACKET_V3 ring buffer. A local user able to open a raw packet socket (requires the CAP_NET_RAW capability) could use this flaw to elevate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2016-8655, Important)
- A flaw was discovered in the Linux kernel's implementation of VFIO. An attacker issuing an ioctl can create a situation where memory is corrupted and modify memory outside of the expected area. This may overwrite kernel memory and subvert kernel execution. (CVE-2016-9083, Important)
- The use of a kzalloc with an integer multiplication allowed an integer overflow condition to be reached in vfio_pci_intrs.c. This combined with CVE-2016-9083 may allow an attacker to craft an attack and use unallocated memory, potentially crashing the machine. (CVE-2016-9084, Moderate)
Red Hat would like to thank Philip Pettersson for reporting CVE-2016-8655.
Bug Fix(es):
- Previously, the asynchronous page fault woke code references spinlocks, which were actually sleeping locks in the RT kernel. Because of this, when the code was executed from the exception context, a bug warning appeared on the console. With this update, the regular wait queue and spinlock code in this area has been modified to use simple-wait-queue and raw-spinlocks. This code change enables the asynchronous page fault code to run in a non-preemptable state without bug warnings. (BZ#1418035)
Solution
For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:
https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258
The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.
Affected Products
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time 7 x86_64
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time for NFV 7 x86_64
Fixes
- BZ - 1389258 - CVE-2016-9083 kernel: State machine confusion bug in vfio driver leading to memory corruption
- BZ - 1389259 - CVE-2016-9084 kernel: Integer overflow when using kzalloc in vfio driver
- BZ - 1393350 - CVE-2016-8630 kernel: kvm: x86: NULL pointer dereference during instruction decode
- BZ - 1400019 - CVE-2016-8655 kernel: Race condition in packet_set_ring leads to use after free
- BZ - 1415172 - kernel-rt: update to the RHEL7.3.z batch#3 source tree [rt-7.3.z]
CVEs
References
Vulmon