Issued:

2011-12-06

Updated:

2011-12-06

RHSA-2011:1532 - Moderate: kexec-tools security, bug fix, and enhancement update

Synopsis

Moderate: kexec-tools security, bug fix, and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory Moderate

Topic

An updated kexec-tools package that fixes three security issues, various bugs, and adds enhancements is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

Description

Kexec allows for booting a Linux kernel from the context of an already running kernel.

Kdump used the SSH (Secure Shell) "StrictHostKeyChecking=no" option when dumping to SSH targets, causing the target kdump server's SSH host key not to be checked. This could make it easier for a man-in-the-middle attacker on the local network to impersonate the kdump SSH target server and possibly gain access to sensitive information in the vmcore dumps. (CVE-2011-3588)

mkdumprd created initrd files with world-readable permissions. A local user could possibly use this flaw to gain access to sensitive information, such as the private SSH key used to authenticate to a remote server when kdump was configured to dump to an SSH target. (CVE-2011-3589)

mkdumprd included unneeded sensitive files (such as all files from the "/root/.ssh/" directory and the host's private SSH keys) in the resulting initrd. This could lead to an information leak when initrd files were previously created with world-readable permissions. Note: With this update, only the SSH client configuration, known hosts files, and the SSH key configured via the newly introduced sshkey option in "/etc/kdump.conf" are included in the initrd. The default is the key generated when running the "service kdump propagate" command, "/root/.ssh/kdump_id_rsa". (CVE-2011-3590)

Red Hat would like to thank Kevan Carstensen for reporting these issues.

This update also fixes several bugs and adds various enhancements. Space precludes documenting all of these changes in this advisory. Documentation for these bug fixes and enhancements will be available shortly from the Technical Notes document, linked to in the References section.

All kexec-tools users should upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches to resolve these issues and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at This content is not included.https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• kexec-tools-2.0.0-209.el6.i686.rpm
• kexec-tools-debuginfo-2.0.0-209.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kexec-tools-debuginfo-2.0.0-209.el6.s390x.rpm
• kexec-tools-2.0.0-209.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kexec-tools-debuginfo-2.0.0-209.el6.i686.rpm
• kexec-tools-2.0.0-209.el6.s390x.rpm
• kexec-tools-debuginfo-2.0.0-209.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kexec-tools-2.0.0-209.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kexec-tools-2.0.0-209.el6.src.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 681796
• This content is not included.BZ - 708503
• This content is not included.BZ - 716439
• This content is not included.BZ - 719105
• This content is not included.BZ - 725484
• This content is not included.BZ - 727892
• This content is not included.BZ - 731394
• This content is not included.BZ - 734528
• This content is not included.BZ - 739050

CVEs

• CVE-2011-3590
• CVE-2011-3589
• CVE-2011-3588

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate
• https://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.2_Technical_Notes/kexec-tools.html#RHSA-2011-1532

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.