RHSA-2018:1965 — Security Advisory

An update for kernel is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

Security Fix(es):

• An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of Load & Store instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory read from address to which a recent memory write has occurred may see an older value and subsequently cause an update into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2018-3639, PowerPC, x86 AMD)

• kernel: Out-of-bounds access via an XFRM_MSG_MIGRATE xfrm Netlink message (CVE-2017-11600)

For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, and other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.

Red Hat would like to thank Ken Johnson (Microsoft Security Response Center) and Jann Horn (Google Project Zero) for reporting CVE-2018-3639.

Bug Fix(es):

These updated kernel packages include also numerous bug fixes. Space precludes documenting all of the bug fixes in this advisory. See the descriptions in the related Knowledge Article: https://access.redhat.com/articles/3485871