Attacking the hypervisor venom

Who says that the hypervisor is 100% secure. Looks like thanks to the security flaw in a virtual floppy disk VENOM, CVE-2015-3456 has become a reality and can in fact be used to possibly escape from a virtual client into adjacent VM systems.

At the time of this release the QEMU Virtual floppy disk controller (FDC) affects Xen but does not affect VMware, or Hyper-V. 

This vuln is a doozy, and especially for organizations that rely heavily on Xen.

This March I read a great article that had described that if a vulnerability was to be discovered in Xen that Amazon's Steve Schmidt would 'gets busy', which I would take is today!.

Of course this lead's the the next question on my mind.

Has Venom been used to successfully exploit Amazon, and would we know about it?

If you're running any of these - consider the posted workaround asap!
A list of affected Linux distros


  • RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) version 5.x, 6.x and 7.x
  • CentOS Linux version 5.x, 6.x and 7.x
  • OpenStack 5 for RHEL 6
  • OpenStack 4 for RHEL 6
  • OpenStack 5 for RHEL 7
  • OpenStack 6 for RHEL 7
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3
  • Debian Linux code named stretch, sid, jessie, squeeze, and wheezy [and all other distro based on Debian]
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 4 (SLES 10 SP3)
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 4 (SLES 10 SP4)
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 (SLES 11 SP1)
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 2 (SLES 11 SP2)
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 3 (SLES 11 SP3)
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Expanded Support 5, 6 and 7


Read up on the recommended fix and work around here







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