Synopsis:          Important: kvm security update
Issue Date:        2012-09-05
CVE Numbers:       CVE-2012-3515

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for
Linux on AMD64 and Intel 64 systems. KVM is a Linux kernel module built
for the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel.

A flaw was found in the way QEMU handled VT100 terminal escape sequences
when emulating certain character devices. A guest user with privileges to
write to a character device that is emulated on the host using a virtual
console back-end could use this flaw to crash the qemu-kvm process on the
host or, possibly, escalate their privileges on the host. (CVE-2012-3515)

This flaw did not affect the default use of KVM. Affected configurations
were:

* When guests were started from the command line ("/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm"),
and without specifying a serial or parallel device that specifically does
not use a virtual console (vc) back-end. (Note that Red Hat does not
support invoking "qemu-kvm" from the command line on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 5.)

* Guests that were managed via libvirt, such as when using Virtual Machine
Manager (virt-manager), but that have a serial or parallel device that uses
a virtual console back-end. By default, guests managed via libvirt will not
use a virtual console back-end for such devices.

All KVM users should upgrade to these updated packages, which correct this
issue.

SL5
   x86_64
     kmod-kvm-83-249.el5_8.5.x86_64.rpm
     kmod-kvm-debug-83-249.el5_8.5.x86_64.rpm
     kvm-83-249.el5_8.5.x86_64.rpm
     kvm-qemu-img-83-249.el5_8.5.x86_64.rpm
     kvm-tools-83-249.el5_8.5.x86_64.rpm

- Scientific Linux Development Team