CVE-2017-5754

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Important Important Impact What does this mean?
5.5 CVSS v3 Base Score

Description

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-2017-5754 relies on the fact that, on impacted microprocessors, during speculative execution of instruction permission faults, exception generation triggered by a faulting access is suppressed until the retirement of the whole instruction block. In a combination with the fact that memory accesses may populate the cache even when the block is being dropped and never committed (executed), an unprivileged local attacker could use this flaw to read privileged (kernel space) memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. Note: CVE-2017-5754 affects Intel x86-64 microprocessors. AMD x86-64 microprocessors are not affected by this issue.

Statement

Please see the Vulnerability Response article for the full list of updates available and a detailed discussion of this issue.

Meltdown patches for 32-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Red Hat has no current plans to provide mitigations for the Meltdown vulnerability in 32-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environments.

Following many hours of engineering investigation and analysis, Red Hat has determined that introducing changes to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environment would destabilize customer deployments and violate our application binary interface (ABI) and kernel ABI commitments to customers who rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to be absolutely stable.

Although Red Hat has delivered patches to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability in other supported product offerings, the 32-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environment presents unique challenges. The combination of limited address space in 32-bit environments plus the mechanism for passing control from the userspace to kernel and limitations on the stack during this transfer make the projected changes too invasive and disruptive for deployments that require the highest level of system stability. By contrast, 32-bit Meltdown mitigations have been delivered for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, where the changes are far less invasive and risky.

Additional Information

External References

Content from www.cve.org is not included.https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2017-5754

Content from nvd.nist.gov is not included.https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5754

Content from googleprojectzero.blogspot.com is not included.https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html

Content from meltdownattack.com is not included.https://meltdownattack.com

Content from spectreattack.com is not included.https://spectreattack.com/

Affected Packages and Issued Red Hat Security Errata

Products / Services Components State Errata
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Extended Lifecycle Support kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:0292
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 Long Life kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:0464
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:1319
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Advanced Update Support kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:0020
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 Advanced Update Support kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:0018
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 Advanced Update Support kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:0022
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Advanced Update Support kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:0017
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Telco Extended Update Support kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:0017
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 Extended Update Support kernel Fixed RHSA-2018:1346
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 kernel-rt Fixed RHSA-2018:0016
Unless explicitly stated as not affected, all previous versions of packages in any minor update stream of a product listed here should be assumed vulnerable, although may not have been subject to full analysis.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authorities (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications ).

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown Red Hat NVD
CVSS v3 Base Score 5.5 5.6
Attack Vector Local Local
Attack Complexity Low High
Privileges Required Low Low
User Interaction None None
Scope Unchanged Changed
Confidentiality Impact High High
Integrity Impact None None
Availability Impact None None

CVSS v3 Vector

Red Hat CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

NVD CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N

Acknowledgements

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

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Red Hat's CVSS v3 score or Impact different from other vendors?

 For open source software shipped by multiple vendors, the CVSS base scores may vary for each vendor's version depending on the version they ship, how they ship it, the platform, and even how the software is compiled. This makes scoring of vulnerabilities difficult for third-party vulnerability databases such as NVD that only provide a single CVSS base score for each vulnerability. Red Hat scores reflect how a vulnerability affects our products specifically.

For more information, see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/762393.

My product is listed as "Under investigation" or "Affected", when will Red Hat release a fix for this vulnerability?
  • "Under investigation" doesn't necessarily mean that the product is affected by this vulnerability. It only means that our Analysis Team is still working on determining whether the product is affected and how it is affected.
  • "Affected" means that our Analysis Team has determined that this product is affected by this vulnerability and might release a fix to address this in the near future.

What can I do if my product is listed as "Will not fix"?

 A "will not fix" status means that a fix for an affected product version is not planned or not possible due to complexity, which may create additional risk.

Available options depend mostly on the Impact of the vulnerability and the current Life Cycle phase of your product. Overall, you have the following options:
  • Upgrade to a supported product version that includes a fix for this vulnerability (recommended).
  • Apply a mitigation (if one exists).
  • Open a This content is not included.support case to request a prioritization of releasing a fix for this vulnerability.

What can I do if my product is listed as "Fix deferred"?

 A deferred status means that a fix for an affected product version is not guaranteed due to higher-priority development work.

Available options depend mostly on the Impact of the vulnerability and the current Life Cycle phase of your product. Overall, you have the following options:
  • Apply a mitigation (if one exists).
  • Open a This content is not included.support case to request a prioritization of releasing a fix for this vulnerability.
  • Red Hat Engineering focuses on addressing high-priority issues based on their complexity or limited lifecycle support. Therefore, lower-priority issues will not receive immediate fixes.

What is a mitigation?

 A mitigation is an action that can be taken to reduce the impact of a security vulnerability, without deploying any fixes.

I have a Red Hat product but it is not in the above list, is it affected?

 The listed products were found to include one or more of the components that this vulnerability affects. These products underwent a thorough evaluation to determine their affectedness by this vulnerability. Note that layered products (such as container-based offerings) that consume affected components from any of the products listed in this table may be affected and are not represented.

Why is my security scanner reporting my product as vulnerable to this vulnerability even though my product version is fixed or not affected?

 In order to maintain code stability and compatibility, Red Hat usually does not rebase packages to entirely new versions. Instead, we backport fixes and new features to an older version of the package we distribute. This can result in some security scanners that only consider the package version to report the package as vulnerable. To avoid this, we suggest that you use an approved vulnerability scanner from our This content is not included.Red Hat Vulnerability Scanner Certification program.