USN-2608-1: QEMU vulnerabilities

13 May 2015

Several security issues were fixed in QEMU.

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Releases

Packages

  • qemu - Machine emulator and virtualizer
  • qemu-kvm - Machine emulator and virtualizer

Details

Jason Geffner discovered that QEMU incorrectly handled the virtual floppy
driver. This issue is known as VENOM. A malicious guest could use this
issue to cause a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code on
the host as the user running the QEMU process. In the default installation,
when QEMU is used with libvirt, attackers would be isolated by the libvirt
AppArmor profile. (CVE-2015-3456)

Daniel P. Berrange discovered that QEMU incorrectly handled VNC websockets.
A remote attacker could use this issue to cause QEMU to consume memory,
resulting in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 14.04
LTS, Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04. (CVE-2015-1779)

Jan Beulich discovered that QEMU, when used with Xen, didn't properly
restrict access to PCI command registers. A malicious guest could use this
issue to cause a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 14.04
LTS and Ubuntu 14.10. (CVE-2015-2756)

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 15.04
Ubuntu 14.10
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04

After a standard system update you need to restart all QEMU virtual
machines to make all the necessary changes.

References

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Further reading