Security Bulletin: A vulnerability in nettle affects PowerKVM

Summary

PowerKVM is affected by a vulnerability in nettle. IBM has now addressed this vulnerability.

Vulnerability Details

CVEID: CVE-2016-6489**
DESCRIPTION:** Nettle could allow a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information, caused by a cache-related side channel attack in the RSA and DSA decryption code. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to recover the private key from a co-located virtual-machine instance and obtain sensitive information.
CVSS Base Score: 7.4
CVSS Temporal Score: See https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/119042 for the current score
CVSS Environmental Score*: Undefined
CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N)

Affected Products and Versions

PowerKVM 2.1 and PowerKVM 3.1

Remediation/Fixes

Customers can update PowerKVM systems by using “yum update”.

Fix images are made available via Fix Central. For version 3.1, see https://ibm.biz/BdHggw. This issue is addressed as of 3.1.0.2 update 4 or later.

For version 2.1, see https://ibm.biz/BdEnT8. This issue is addressed as of PowerKVM 2.1.1.3-65 update 14 or later. Customers running v2.1 are, in any case, encouraged to upgrade to v3.1.

For v2.1 systems currently running fix levels of PowerKVM prior to 2.1.1, please see <http://download4.boulder.ibm.com/sar/CMA/OSA/05e4c/0/README&gt; for prerequisite fixes and instructions.

Workarounds and Mitigations

None