Identify security updates

Keeping enterprise systems secure from current and future threats requires regular security updates. Red Hat Product Security provides the guidance you need to confidently deploy and maintain enterprise solutions.

Red Hat Security Advisories
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Red Hat Security Advisories (RHSA) document the information about security flaws being fixed in Red Hat products and services.

Each RHSA includes the following information:

  • Severity
  • Type and status
  • Affected products
  • Summary of fixed issues
  • Links to the tickets about the problem. Note that not all tickets are public.
  • Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) numbers and links with additional details, such as attack complexity.

Red Hat Customer Portal provides a list of Red Hat Security Advisories published by Red Hat. You can display details of a specific advisory by navigating to the advisory’s ID from the list of Red Hat Security Advisories.

Figure 1. List of security advisories

Customer Portal: List of security advisories

Optionally, you can also filter the results by specific product, variant, version, and architecture. For example, to display only advisories for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, you can set the following filters:

  • Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • Variant: All Variants
  • Version: 10
  • Optionally, select a minor version.

Display security updates that are not installed on a host
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Display all security updates that are currently not installed on your host system to identify critical packages that require immediate action or installation.

Before you begin
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  • A Red Hat subscription is attached to the host.

About this task
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You can list all available security updates for your system by using the DNF utility.

Procedure
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List all available security updates which have not been installed on the host: 
# dnf updateinfo list updates security
 
…
RHSA-2019:0997 Important/Sec. platform-python-3.6.8-2.el8_0.x86_64
RHSA-2019:0997 Important/Sec. python3-libs-3.6.8-2.el8_0.x86_64
RHSA-2019:0990 Moderate/Sec.  systemd-239-13.el8_0.3.x86_64
…

Display security updates that are installed on a host
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Display security updates that are already installed on your host. This helps you verify that required fixes are applied and track your system’s current security posture.

Before you begin
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  • A Red Hat subscription is attached to the host.

About this task
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You can list installed security updates for your system by using the DNF utility.

Procedure
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List all security updates which are installed on the host: 
# dnf updateinfo list security --installed
 
…
RHSA-2019:1234 Important/Sec. libssh2-1.8.0-7.module+el8+2833+c7d6d092
RHSA-2019:4567 Important/Sec. python3-libs-3.6.7.1.el8.x86_64
RHSA-2019:8901 Important/Sec. python3-libs-3.6.8-1.el8.x86_64
…

If multiple updates of a single package are installed, dnf lists all advisories for the package. In the previous example, two security updates for the python3-libs package have been installed since the system installation.

Display a specific advisory by using DNF
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Use the DNF utility to display detailed information about a specific security advisory. This helps you understand the related bug, its severity, and which packages are included in the fix.

Before you begin
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  • A Red Hat subscription is attached to the host.
  • You know the ID of the security advisory.
  • The update provided by the advisory is not installed.

Procedure
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Display a specific advisory, for example: 
# dnf updateinfo info RHSA-2019:0997
 
====================================================================
  Important: python3 security update
====================================================================
  Update ID: RHSA-2019:0997
       Type: security
    Updated: 2019-05-07 05:41:52
       Bugs: 1688543 - CVE-2019-9636 python: Information Disclosure due to urlsplit improper NFKC normalization
       CVEs: CVE-2019-9636
Description: …