RHSA-2015:1508 — Security Advisory
Red Hat Security Advisory: qemu-kvm-rhev security update
Severity
ImportantRed Hat Product Security
Products
Official CSAF product identity
Published · July 27, 2015
Updated · June 28, 2026
Topic
Updated qemu-kvm-rhev packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor 7.
Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Important security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.
Description
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on AMD64 and Intel 64 systems. The qemu-kvm-rhev package provides the user-space component for running virtual machines using KVM.
A heap buffer overflow flaw was found in the way QEMU's IDE subsystem handled I/O buffer access while processing certain ATAPI commands. A privileged guest user in a guest with the CDROM drive enabled could potentially use this flaw to execute arbitrary code on the host with the privileges of the host's QEMU process corresponding to the guest. (CVE-2015-5154)
An out-of-bounds memory access flaw, leading to memory corruption or possibly an information leak, was found in QEMU's pit_ioport_read() function. A privileged guest user in a QEMU guest, which had QEMU PIT emulation enabled, could potentially, in rare cases, use this flaw to execute arbitrary code on the host with the privileges of the hosting QEMU process. (CVE-2015-3214)
Red Hat would like to thank Matt Tait of Google's Project Zero security team for reporting the CVE-2015-3214 issue. The CVE-2015-5154 issue was discovered by Kevin Wolf of Red Hat.
All qemu-kvm-rhev users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. After installing this update, shut down all running virtual machines. Once all virtual machines have shut down, start them again for this update to take effect.