RHSA-2015:1837 — Security Advisory
Red Hat Security Advisory: qemu-kvm-rhev security update
Severity
ImportantRed Hat Product Security
Products
Official CSAF product identity
Published · September 24, 2015
Updated · June 28, 2026
Topic
Updated qemu-kvm-rhev packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor 7.
Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Important 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.
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-based buffer overflow issue was found in the QEMU emulator's VNC display driver. It could occur while refreshing the VNC server's display surface using the vnc_refresh_server_surface() routine. A privileged guest user could use this flaw to corrupt the heap memory and crash the QEMU process instance, or to potentially use it to execute arbitrary code on the host. (CVE-2015-5225)
Red Hat would like to thank Mr Qinghao Tang from QIHU 360 Inc. and Mr Zuozhi from Alibaba Inc. for reporting this issue.
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.