[pve-devel] Running KVM as root is a security issue

[Eric Blevins]

I have no idea if CVE-2015-5154 that Stephan inquired about affests Proxmox.

But when I see exploits like that the first thought in my mind is how
easy it would be for such an exploit to get root on the Proxmox host.

I've done some experimenting. If I take the KVM command as generated
by Proxmox and simply add "-runas nobody" the VM starts up and runs
without a problem.

However when I try to open a console the KVM process fails.
I suspect this is just some permissions in creating the socket but not
investidated.

A patch exists to prevent a crash when a socket cannot be opened.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-05/msg00577.html

Any chance this security issue can be fixed before the 4.0 release?

Eric