(RHSA-2017:0549) Moderate: redhat-virtualization-host security and bug fix update

The redhat-virtualization-host packages provide the Red Hat Virtualization Host. These packages include redhat-release-virtualization-host, ovirt-node, and rhev-hypervisor. Red Hat Virtualization Hosts (RHVH) are installed using a special build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with only the packages required to host virtual machines. RHVH features a Cockpit user interface for monitoring the host’s resources and performing administrative tasks.

The following packages have been upgraded to a later upstream version: redhat-release-virtualization-host (4.0), imgbased (0.8.16), redhat-virtualization-host (4.0). (BZ#1410848, BZ#1430244)

Security Fix(es):

• A vulnerability was discovered in SPICE in the server’s protocol handling. An authenticated attacker could send crafted messages to the SPICE server causing a heap overflow leading to a crash or possible code execution. (CVE-2016-9577)

• A vulnerability was discovered in SPICE in the server’s protocol handling. An attacker able to connect to the SPICE server could send crafted messages which would cause the process to crash. (CVE-2016-9578)

These issues were discovered by Frediano Ziglio (Red Hat).

Bug Fix(es):

• Previously, imgbased blindly copied /etc from old layers into new layers in order to keep configuration changes between upgrades. This meant that imgbased’s behavior differed from RPM, in that unmodified configuration files would be preserved across imgbased upgrades whereas ‘yum upgrade’ of the same packages would have replaced them. Now, imgbased compares the sums of files to the originals kept per-layer in /usr/share/factory/etc so that unmodified configuration files are now handled appropriately. (BZ#1418179)

• Previously, some earlier versions of Red Hat Virtualization Host (RHVH) repeatedly prompted for upgrades, even when the most recent version was already installed. This was caused by the RHVH image containing a placeholder package that was made obsolete in order to upgrade. However, the package that was used to upgrade was not propagated to the rpmdb on the new image. Now, upgrading includes the update package in the rpmdb on the new image. (BZ#1422476)

• With this update, Red Hat Virtualization Host (RHVH) now includes the ‘screen’ package. Previously, ovirt-hosted-engine-setup invoked from a CLI warned users that the ‘screen’ package was not installed. Though this was not an explicit requirement when using cockpit, including it provides a better experience if using the CLI. (BZ#1403729)