Description
A flaw was found in the way QEMU handled VT100 terminal escape sequences
when emulating certain character devices. A guest user with privileges to
write to a character device that is emulated on the host using a virtual
console back-end could use this flaw to crash the qemu-kvm process on the
host or, possibly, escalate their privileges on the host. (CVE-2012-3515)
This flaw did not affect the default use of KVM. Affected configurations
were:
* When guests were started from the command line ("/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm")
without the "-nodefaults" option, and also without specifying a
serial or parallel device, or a virtio-console device, that specifically
does not use a virtual console (vc) back-end. (Note that Red Hat does not
support invoking "qemu-kvm" from the command line without "-nodefaults" on
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.)
* Guests that were managed via libvirt, such as when using Virtual Machine
Manager (virt-manager), but that have a serial or parallel device, or a
virtio-console device, that uses a virtual console back-end. By default,
guests managed via libvirt will not use a virtual console back-end
for such devices.