RHEL 5 : xen (RHSA-2012:1236)

high Nessus Plugin ID 61793

Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

Updated xen packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

The xen packages contain administration tools and the xend service for managing the kernel-xen kernel for virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

A flaw was found in the way QEMU handled VT100 terminal escape sequences when emulating certain character devices. A guest user with privileges to write to a character device that is emulated on the host using a virtual console back-end could use this flaw to crash the qemu process on the host or, possibly, escalate their privileges on the host. (CVE-2012-3515)

This flaw did not affect the default use of the Xen hypervisor implementation in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This problem only affected fully-virtualized guests that have a serial or parallel device that uses a virtual console (vc) back-end. By default, the virtual console back-end is not used for such devices; only guests explicitly configured to use them in this way were affected.

Red Hat would like to thank the Xen project for reporting this issue.

All users of xen are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which correct this issue. After installing the updated packages, all fully-virtualized guests must be restarted for this update to take effect.

Solution

Update the affected packages.

See Also

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012:1236

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2012-3515

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 61793

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2012-1236.nasl

Version: 1.19

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 9/6/2012

Updated: 1/14/2021

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.8

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.2

Temporal Score: 6.3

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:xen-libs, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5

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: 9/5/2012

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2012-3515

BID: 55413

RHSA: 2012:1236