iwl100, iwl1000, iwl105, iwl135, iwl2000, iwl2030, iwl3160, iwl3945, iwl4965, iwl5000, iwl5150, iwl6000, iwl6000g2a, iwl6000g2b, iwl6050, iwl7260, iwl7265, linux security update

CentOS Errata and Security Advisory CESA-2018:0014

The linux-firmware packages contain all of the firmware files that are required by various devices to operate.

Security Fix(es):

• An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. Variant CVE-2017-5715 triggers the speculative execution by utilizing branch target injection. It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory accesses may cause allocation 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 cross the syscall and guest/host boundaries and read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. (CVE-2017-5715)

Note: This is the microcode counterpart of the CVE-2017-5715 kernel mitigation.

Red Hat would like to thank Google Project Zero for reporting this issue.

Merged security bulletin from advisories:
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-January/084860.html

Affected packages:
iwl100-firmware
iwl1000-firmware
iwl105-firmware
iwl135-firmware
iwl2000-firmware
iwl2030-firmware
iwl3160-firmware
iwl3945-firmware
iwl4965-firmware
iwl5000-firmware
iwl5150-firmware
iwl6000-firmware
iwl6000g2a-firmware
iwl6000g2b-firmware
iwl6050-firmware
iwl7260-firmware
iwl7265-firmware
linux-firmware

Upstream details at:
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:0014