USN-776-1: KVM vulnerabilities
12 May 2009
kvm vulnerabilities
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
- Ubuntu 8.10
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Software Description
- kvm
Details
Avi Kivity discovered that KVM did not correctly handle certain disk formats. A local attacker could attach a malicious partition that would allow the guest VM to read files on the VM host. (CVE-2008-1945, CVE-2008-2004)
Alfredo Ortega discovered that KVM’s VNC protocol handler did not correctly validate certain messages. A remote attacker could send specially crafted VNC messages that would cause KVM to consume CPU resources, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-2382)
Jan Niehusmann discovered that KVM’s Cirrus VGA implementation over VNC did not correctly handle certain bitblt operations. A local attacker could exploit this flaw to potentially execute arbitrary code on the VM host or crash KVM, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-4539)
It was discovered that KVM’s VNC password checks did not use the correct length. A remote attacker could exploit this flaw to cause KVM to crash, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5714)
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
- Ubuntu 8.10
- kvm - 1:72+dfsg-1ubuntu6.1
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
- kvm - 1:62+dfsg-0ubuntu8.1
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
After a standard system upgrade you need to restart all KVM VMs to effect the necessary changes.