Security Alert (A18-01-09): Multiple Vulnerabilities in Hypervisors

Description:

The recent disclosed security issues, known as Meltdown and Spectre, affects most hypervisors in a virtualised environment. It allows of information disclosure between virtual machines on the same hosts or between processes within a same virtual machine. Exploiting the security issue requires an attacker to load and run malicious programs on affected systems.

Affected Systems:

• VMware vCenter Server (VC), vSphere ESXi (ESXi), VMware Workstation Pro / Player (Workstation) and VMware Fusion Pro / Fusion (Fusion)
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• All versions of Xen
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 ELS and 4.1

Impact:

A successful attack could lead to arbitrary code execution, elevation of privilege, or information disclosure.

Recommendation:

Some product vendors have provided information on the patches of the vulnerabilities for their products as listed below. The list is not exhaustive and it is recommended to consult the product vendors to confirm the availability of patches.

• Microsoft Hyper-V
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/CVE-2017-5715-and-hyper-v-vms
  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072698/windows-server-guidance-to-protect-against-the-speculative-execution
  
  
• VMWare
  https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0002.html
  https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0004.html
  
  
• Xen
  http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-254.html
  
  
• Red Hat
  https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3307851
  
  

System administrators should apply the patches once available or follow the recommendations provided by the product vendors to mitigate the risk.

More Information:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.hk/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html
https://meltdownattack.com/
https://spectreattack.com/
https://www.hkcert.org/my_url/zh/alert/18010401
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-004A
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5715
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5753
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5754