Arbitrary Code Execution

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. A heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the way SPICE handled certain guest QXL commands related to surface creation. A user in a guest could use this flaw to read and write arbitrary memory locations on the host. (CVE-2015-5261) A heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the way spice handled certain QXL commands related to the “surface_id” parameter. A user in a guest could use this flaw to crash the host QEMU-KVM process or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the host QEMU-KVM process. (CVE-2015-5260) These issues were discovered by Frediano Ziglio of Red Hat. All spice-server users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches to correct these issues.