USN-3651-1: QEMU update

21 May 2018

Side channel execution mitigations were added to QEMU.

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Releases

Packages

  • qemu - Machine emulator and virtualizer

Details

Ken Johnson and Jann Horn independently discovered that microprocessors utilizing
speculative execution of a memory read may allow unauthorized memory reads via
sidechannel attacks. An attacker in the guest could use this to expose sensitive
guest information, including kernel memory. This update allows QEMU to expose new
CPU features added by microcode updates to guests on amd64 and i386.

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 17.10
Ubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 14.04

After a standard system update you need to restart all QEMU virtual
machines to make all the necessary changes.

References

Related notices

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