USN-2736-1: Spice vulnerability

Publication date

8 September 2015

Overview

Spice could be made to crash or run programs.


Packages

  • spice - SPICE protocol client and server library

Details

Frediano Ziglio discovered that Spice incorrectly handled monitor configs.
A malicious guest could use this issue to cause a denial of service, or
possibly execute arbitrary code on the host as the user running the QEMU
process. In the default installation, when QEMU is used with libvirt,
attackers would be isolated by the libvirt AppArmor profile.

Frediano Ziglio discovered that Spice incorrectly handled monitor configs.
A malicious guest could use this issue to cause a denial of service, or
possibly execute arbitrary code on the host as the user running the QEMU
process. In the default installation, when QEMU is used with libvirt,
attackers would be isolated by the libvirt AppArmor profile.

Update instructions

After a standard system update you need to restart all QEMU virtual machines using Spice to make the necessary changes.

Learn more about how to get the fixes.

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu Release Package Version
15.04 vivid libspice-server1 –  0.12.5-1ubuntu0.1
14.04 trusty libspice-server1 –  0.12.4-0nocelt2ubuntu1.1

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