Information on CVE-2015-5154

Overview

Information on CVE-2015-5154 was made public on July 27, 2015. The vulnerability is in QEMU, a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer that is utilized by Xen, KVM, and other modern hypervisors / virtualization platforms.

Impact

Specifically a flaw with how QEMU’s IDE subsystem handles buffer access while processing certain ATAPI commands, exploitation can allow for the execution of arbitrary code on the host with the privileges of the host’s QEMU process corresponding to the guest.

Summary

• Made public on July 27, 2015
• This flaw exploits QEMU, a generic and open source machine emulator.
• Allows for an attacker to execute arbitrary code outside of their own virtual machine.

Resolution

A patch is available, and Liquid Web’s Heroic Support has proactively scheduled a reboot to patch all affected servers.

Red Hat states:

A heap buffer overflow flaw was found in the way QEMU’s IDE subsystem handled I/O buffer access while processing certain ATAPI commands. A privileged guest user in a guest with the CDROM drive enabled could potentially use this flaw to execute arbitrary code on the host with the privileges of the host’s QEMU process corresponding to the guest.

Further information about this issue, visit the CVE-2015-5154 site.