qemu-kvm vulnerability

27 July 2011

qemu-kvm vulnerability

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

• Ubuntu 11.04
• Ubuntu 10.10
• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Summary

QEMU could be made to run with adminstrator group privileges under certain circumstances.

Software Description

• qemu-kvm - Machine emulator and virtualizer

Details

Andrew Griffiths discovered that QEMU did not correctly drop privileges when using the ‘runas’ argument. Under certain circumstances a local attacker could exploit this to escalate privileges.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 11.04

qemu-kvm - 0.14.0+noroms-0ubuntu4.4

Ubuntu 10.10

qemu-kvm - 0.12.5+noroms-0ubuntu7.10

qemu-kvm-extras - 0.12.5+noroms-0ubuntu7.10

qemu-kvm-extras-static - 0.12.5+noroms-0ubuntu7.10

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

qemu-kvm - 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.15

qemu-kvm-extras - 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.15

qemu-kvm-extras-static - 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.15

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2011-2527