Important: systemd security update

Synopsis

Important: systemd security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for systemd is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Extended Update Support.

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 systemd packages contain systemd, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with the SysV and LSB init scripts. It provides aggressive parallelism capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, and keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups. In addition, it supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can also work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.

Security Fix(es):

  • systemd: stack overflow when calling syslog from a command with long cmdline (CVE-2018-16864)
  • systemd: stack overflow when receiving many journald entries (CVE-2018-16865)

For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, and other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.

Red Hat would like to thank Qualys Research Labs for reporting these issues.

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

Affected Products

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Update Support 7.4 x86_64
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian - Extended Update Support 7.4 ppc64
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux EUS Compute Node 7.4 x86_64
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 7.4 x86_64
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems - Extended Update Support 7.4 s390x
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian - Extended Update Support 7.4 ppc64le
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - TUS 7.4 x86_64
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (for IBM Power LE) - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.4 ppc64le
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Update Services for SAP Solutions 7.4 x86_64

Fixes

  • BZ - 1653855 - CVE-2018-16864 systemd: stack overflow when calling syslog from a command with long cmdline
  • BZ - 1653861 - CVE-2018-16865 systemd: stack overflow when receiving many journald entries

CVEs

References