The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2018:2216 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, x86 AMD)

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

    Bug Fix(es):

    * When switching from the indirect branch speculation (IBRS) feature to the retpolines feature, the IBRS     state of some CPUs was sometimes not handled correctly. Consequently, some CPUs were left with the IBRS     Model-Specific Register (MSR) bit set to 1, which could lead to performance issues. With this update, the     underlying source code has been fixed to clear the IBRS MSR bits correctly, thus fixing the bug.
    (BZ#1586145)

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-2018:2216)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 111148

Version 1.13

Version 1.12

Version 1.11

Version 1.13 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 1.12 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 1.11 Sep 4, 2024, 9:21 AM CVSSv2 score source (set to "CVE-2018-3639") Plugin Feed: 202409040921