(RHSA-2016:1204) Important: spice-server security update

The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) is a remote display protocol for virtual environments. SPICE users can access a virtualized desktop or server from the local system or any system with network access to the server. SPICE is used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for viewing virtualized guests running on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor or on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors.

Security Fix(es):

• A memory allocation flaw, leading to a heap-based buffer overflow, was found in spice’s smartcard interaction, which runs under the QEMU-KVM context on the host. A user connecting to a guest VM using spice could potentially use this flaw to crash the QEMU-KVM process or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the host’s QEMU-KVM process. (CVE-2016-0749)

• A memory access flaw was found in the way spice handled certain guests using crafted primary surface parameters. A user in a guest could use this flaw to read from and write to arbitrary memory locations on the host. (CVE-2016-2150)

The CVE-2016-0749 issue was discovered by Jing Zhao (Red Hat) and the CVE-2016-2150 issue was discovered by Frediano Ziglio (Red Hat).