Florian Weimer of the Red Hat Product Security Team discovered that hypervkvpd would exit when it processed a spoofed Netlink packet that had been sent from an untrusted local user, in the following code: len = recvfrom(fd, kvp_recv_buffer, sizeof(kvp_recv_buffer), 0, addr_p, &addr_l); if (len < 0 || addr.nl_pid) { syslog(LOG_ERR, "recvfrom failed; pid:%u error:%d %s", addr.nl_pid, errno, strerror(errno)); close(fd); return -1; } Acknowledgements: This issue was discovered by Florian Weimer of the Red Hat Product Security Team.
Upstream commit: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/gregkh/char-misc.git;a=commit;h=95a69adab9acfc3981c504737a2b6578e4d846ef
Statement: The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this issue as having low security impact. A future update may address this issue. For additional information, refer to the Issue Severity Classification: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/.
This was actually reported to oss-sec back in June: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2012/q2/476 And it was then assigned the name CVE-2012-2669.
As explained in: http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/11/27/12 These are two different flaws. CVE-2012-2669 is for "failing to check origin of netlink messages" and CVE-2012-5532 is for the "exiting upon receipt of spoofed netlink messages". This bug is indeed for CVE-2012-5532.
Bug #893728 was filed for CVE-2012-2669, although it does not affect Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 at all (so there is a statement to that effect with the appropriate references).
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2013:0807 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-0807.html