The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2018:1637 advisory.

    The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

    Security Fix(es):

    * An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented     speculative execution of Load & Store instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). It relies     on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact     that memory read from address to which a recent memory write has occurred may see an older value and     subsequently cause an update into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed     instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this     flaw to read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2018-3639)

    Note: This issue is present in hardware and cannot be fully fixed via software update. The updated kernel     packages provide software side of the mitigation for this hardware issue. To be fully functional, up-to-     date CPU microcode applied on the system is required. Please refer to References section for further     information about this issue, CPU microcode requirements and the potential performance impact.

    In this update mitigations for x86-64 architecture are provided.

    Red Hat would like to thank Ken Johnson (Microsoft Security Response Center) and Jann Horn (Google Project     Zero) for reporting this issue.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Detections

Analytics

RHEL 7 : kernel (RHSA-2018:1637)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 110215

Version 1.20

Version 1.19

Version 1.18

Version 1.20 Jan 12, 2026, 2:57 PM CVSS temporal metrics ("CVSSv2 temporal vector" set to "CVSS2#E:F/RL:OF/RC:C") CVSS temporal metrics ("CVSSv3 temporal vector" set to "CVSS:3.0/E:F/RL:O/RC:C") Exploit attributes ("Exploit framework core" set to "True") Plugin Feed: 202601121457
Version 1.19 Nov 5, 2024, 12:50 PM CVSS metrics ("Cvssv4 score" set to 0.0) CVSSv2 severity (based on None, severity decreased from "High" to "Low") Detection (updated detection logic) Plugin metadata Reference Plugin Feed: 202411051250
Version 1.18 Sep 30, 2024, 7:18 AM CVSSv2 score source (set to "CVE-2018-3639") Plugin Feed: 202409300718