4.9 - RHSA-2016:2610

Problem Description:

An update for systemd is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Moderate. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client (v. 7) - x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client Optional (v. 7) - x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode (v. 7) - x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode Optional (v. 7) - x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 7) - aarch64, ppc64, ppc64le, s390x, x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Optional (v. 7) - aarch64, ppc64, ppc64le, s390x, x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 7) - x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation Optional (v. 7) - x86_64

3. Description:

The systemd packages contain systemd, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with the SysV and LSB init scripts. It provides aggressive parallelism capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, and keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups. In addition, it supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can also work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.

Security Fix(es):

* A flaw was found in the way systemd handled empty notification messages. A local attacker could use this flaw to make systemd freeze its execution, preventing further management of system services, system shutdown, or zombie process collection via systemd. (CVE-2016-7795)

Bug Fix(es):

* Previously, the udev device manager automatically enabled all memory banks on IBM z System installations. As a consequence, hot plug memory was enabled automatically, which was incorrect. With this update, system architecture checks have been added to the udev rules to address the problem. As a result, hot plug memory is no longer automatically enabled. (BZ#1381123)

4. Solution:

For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

5. Bugs fixed (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/):

1380286 - CVE-2016-7795 systemd: Assertion failure when PID 1 receives a zero-length message over notify socket 1380686 - systemctl show changes 1381123 - s390x standby memory automatically onlined after boot [rhel-7.3.z]