1.85.2. RHSA-2011:0391: Important libvirt security update

Updated libvirt packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

The libvirt library is a C API for managing and interacting with the virtualization capabilities of Linux and other operating systems. In addition, libvirt provides tools for remotely managing virtualized systems.

It was found that several libvirt API calls did not honor the read-only permission for connections. A local attacker able to establish a read-only connection to libvirtd on a server could use this flaw to execute commands that should be restricted to read-write connections, possibly leading to a denial of service or privilege escalation. (CVE-2011-1146)

Note: Previously, using rpmbuild without the '--define "rhel 5"' option to build the libvirt source RPM on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 failed with a "Failed build dependencies" error for the device-mapper-devel package, as this -devel sub-package is not available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. With this update, the -devel sub-package is no longer checked by default as a dependency when building on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, allowing the libvirt source RPM to build as expected.

All libvirt users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to resolve this issue. After installing the updated packages, libvirtd must be restarted ("service libvirtd restart") for this update to take effect.