Debian Security Advisory

DSA-1907-1 kvm -- several vulnerabilities

Date Reported:

13 Oct 2009

Affected Packages:

kvm

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In the Debian bugtracking system: Bug 509997, Bug 548975.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2008-5714, CVE-2009-3290.

More information:

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in kvm, a full virtualization system. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:

CVE-2008-5714
Chris Webb discovered an off-by-one bug limiting KVM's VNC passwords to 7 characters. This flaw might make it easier for remote attackers to guess the VNC password, which is limited to seven characters where eight was intended.
CVE-2009-3290
It was discovered that the kvm_emulate_hypercall function in KVM does not prevent access to MMU hypercalls from ring 0, which allows local guest OS users to cause a denial of service (guest kernel crash) and read or write guest kernel memory.

The oldstable distribution (etch) does not contain kvm.

For the stable distribution (lenny), these problems have been fixed in version 72+dfsg-5~lenny3.

For the testing distribution (squeeze) these problems will be fixed soon.

For the unstable distribution (sid) these problems have been fixed in version 85+dfsg-4.1

We recommend that you upgrade your kvm packages.

Fixed in:

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny)

Source:: http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/k/kvm/kvm_72+dfsg-5~lenny3.dsc; http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/k/kvm/kvm_72+dfsg-5~lenny3.diff.gz; http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/k/kvm/kvm_72+dfsg.orig.tar.gz
Architecture-independent component:: http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/k/kvm/kvm-source_72+dfsg-5~lenny3_all.deb
AMD64:: http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/k/kvm/kvm_72+dfsg-5~lenny3_amd64.deb
Intel IA-32:: http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/k/kvm/kvm_72+dfsg-5~lenny3_i386.deb

MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.