The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - libvirt 1.0.0 through 1.2.x before 1.2.5, when fine grained access control is enabled, allows local users     to read arbitrary files via a crafted XML document containing an XML external entity declaration in     conjunction with an entity reference to the (1) virDomainDefineXML, (2) virNetworkCreateXML, (3)     virNetworkDefineXML, (4) virStoragePoolCreateXML, (5) virStoragePoolDefineXML, (6) virStorageVolCreateXML,     (7) virDomainCreateXML, (8) virNodeDeviceCreateXML, (9) virInterfaceDefineXML, (10)     virStorageVolCreateXMLFrom, (11) virConnectDomainXMLFromNative, (12) virConnectDomainXMLToNative, (13)     virSecretDefineXML, (14) virNWFilterDefineXML, (15) virDomainSnapshotCreateXML, (16)     virDomainSaveImageDefineXML, (17) virDomainCreateXMLWithFiles, (18) virConnectCompareCPU, or (19)     virConnectBaselineCPU API method, related to an XML External Entity (XXE) issue. NOTE: this issue was     SPLIT from CVE-2014-0179 per ADT3 due to different affected versions of some vectors. (CVE-2014-5177)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

Updated libvirt packages that fix one security issue and three bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Moderate 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 libvirt library is a C API for managing and interacting with the virtualization capabilities of Linux and other operating systems. In addition, libvirt provides tools for remote management of virtualized systems.

It was found that libvirt passes the XML_PARSE_NOENT flag when parsing XML documents using the libxml2 library, in which case all XML entities in the parsed documents are expanded. A user able to force libvirtd to parse an XML document with an entity pointing to a special file that blocks on read access could use this flaw to cause libvirtd to hang indefinitely, resulting in a denial of service on the system.
(CVE-2014-0179)

Red Hat would like to thank the upstream Libvirt project for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Daniel P. Berrange and Richard Jones as the original reporters.

This update also fixes the following bugs :

* When hot unplugging a virtual CPU (vCPU), libvirt kept a pointer to already freed memory if the vCPU was pinned to a host CPU.
Consequently, when reading the CPU pinning information, libvirt terminated unexpectedly due to an attempt to access this memory. This update ensures that libvirt releases the pointer to the previously allocated memory when a vCPU is being hot unplugged, and it no longer crashes in this situation. (BZ#1091206)

* Previously, libvirt passed an incorrect argument to the 'tc' command when setting quality of service (QoS) on a network interface controller (NIC). As a consequence, QoS was applied only to IP traffic. With this update, libvirt constructs the 'tc' command correctly so that QoS is applied to all traffic as expected.
(BZ#1096806)

* When using the sanlock daemon for managing access to shared storage, libvirt expected all QEMU domains to be registered with sanlock.
However, if a QEMU domain was started prior to enabling sanlock, the domain was not registered with sanlock. Consequently, migration of a virtual machine (VM) from such a QEMU domain failed with a libvirt error. With this update, libvirt verifies whether a QEMU domain process is registered with sanlock before it starts working with the domain, ensuring that migration of virtual machines works as expected.
(BZ#1097227)

All libvirt users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. After installing the updated packages, libvirtd will be restarted automatically.

The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-201412-04 (libvirt: Multiple vulnerabilities)

    Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in libvirt. Please review       the CVE identifiers referenced below for details.
  Impact :

    A remote attacker may be able to cause a Denial of Service or cause       information leakage. A local attacker may be able to escalate privileges,       cause a Denial of Service or possibly execute arbitrary code.
  Workaround :

    There is no known workaround at this time.

Updated libvirt packages that fix one security issue and three bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Moderate 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 libvirt library is a C API for managing and interacting with the virtualization capabilities of Linux and other operating systems. In addition, libvirt provides tools for remote management of virtualized systems.

It was found that libvirt passes the XML_PARSE_NOENT flag when parsing XML documents using the libxml2 library, in which case all XML entities in the parsed documents are expanded. A user able to force libvirtd to parse an XML document with an entity pointing to a file could use this flaw to read the contents of that file; parsing an XML document with an entity pointing to a special file that blocks on read access could cause libvirtd to hang indefinitely, resulting in a denial of service on the system. (CVE-2014-0179)

Red Hat would like to thank the upstream Libvirt project for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Daniel P. Berrange and Richard Jones as the original reporters.

This update also fixes the following bugs :

* A previous update of the libvirt package introduced an error; a SIG_SETMASK argument was incorrectly replaced by a SIG_BLOCK argument after the poll() system call. Consequently, the SIGCHLD signal could be permanently blocked, which caused signal masks to not return to their original values and defunct processes to be generated. With this update, the original signal masks are restored and defunct processes are no longer generated. (BZ#1112689)

* An attempt to start a domain that did not exist caused network filters to be locked for read-only access. As a consequence, when trying to gain read-write access, a deadlock occurred. This update applies a patch to fix this bug and an attempt to start a non-existent domain no longer causes a deadlock in the described scenario.
(BZ#1112690)

* Previously, the libvirtd daemon was binding only to addresses that were configured on certain network interfaces. When libvirtd started before the IPv4 addresses had been configured, libvirtd listened only on the IPv6 addresses. The daemon has been modified to not require an address to be configured when binding to a wildcard address, such as '0.0.0.0' or '::'. As a result, libvirtd binds to both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as expected. (BZ#1112692)

Users of libvirt are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs. After installing the updated packages, libvirtd will be restarted automatically.

The remote Ubuntu 14.04 LTS host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the USN-2366-1 advisory.

    Daniel P. Berrange and Richard Jones discovered that libvirt incorrectly handled XML documents containing     XML external entity declarations. An attacker could use this issue to cause libvirtd to crash, resulting     in a denial of service on all affected releases, or possibly read arbitrary files if fine grained access     control was enabled on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (CVE-2014-0179, CVE-2014-5177)

    Luyao Huang discovered that libvirt incorrectly handled certain blkiotune queries. An attacker could use     this issue to cause libvirtd to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only applied to Ubuntu     12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (CVE-2014-3633)

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory.

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

ID	Name	Product	Family	Published	Updated	Severity
218204	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2014-5177	Nessus	Misc.	3/4/2025	3/4/2025	medium
74226	CentOS 6 : libvirt (CESA-2014:0560)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	5/29/2014	1/4/2021	low
79814	GLSA-201412-04 : libvirt: Multiple vulnerabilities	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	12/9/2014	1/6/2021	high
76904	RHEL 7 : libvirt (RHSA-2014:0914)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	7/30/2014	1/14/2021	low
76684	CentOS 7 : libvirt (CESA-2014:0914)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	7/23/2014	1/4/2021	low
78010	Ubuntu 14.04 LTS : libvirt vulnerabilities (USN-2366-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	10/1/2014	8/28/2024	critical

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