Linux/QEMU issue

[Jamie Strandboge <jamie () canonical com>]

Ubuntu recently released http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-863-1 against
qemu. Due to an oversight, this was not brought to the attention of
oss-security before now.

This issue is public and fixed upstream, and affects guests using a
2.6.25 kernel (or backported virtio net drivers from the 2.6.25 kernel,
like our 8.04 LTS release does). Specifically, if a guest with the
affected virtio net drivers is running under qemu/kvm, then if you
saturate a network connection to the guest, the guest will crash. This
is https://launchpad.net/bugs/458521.

There was not consensus on whether this should get a CVE. You can see
the patch and upstream discussion here:
http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/56479/

The bug is really two parts though: the qemu issue which crashes the
guest, and the guest kernel writing garbage to the virtio net backend.
We decided to fix it as a security update in qemu since a remote
attacker could DoS an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS guest, possibly leading to data
corruption within the guest. 2.6.26 and later kernels should not be
affected.

Jamie

-- 
Jamie Strandboge             | http://www.canonical.com

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