Red Hat expands coverage of CVE fixes

At Red Hat, addressing customers' security risk is of paramount importance. That’s why, after listening to our customers carefully, we have decided to expand the scope of coverage for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) remediation. By expanding the scope, we hope to reduce the risk profile of our customers, maintain greater stability of their enterprise deployments and lessen the time to resolution of internal security audits.

What is this change?

As of October 1, 2019, Red Hat has expanded the scope of addressing fixes or remediations for Red Hat-defined Critical and Important CVEs on all actively supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This includes active releases in RHEL 6, 7 and 8, with future releases automatically inheriting this enhanced CVE policy, including all future major versions of RHEL.

This enhanced policy also applies to the active Red Hat Enterprise Linux extended Support Add-ons including Extended Update Support (EUS), Update Services for SAP Solutions, and Telecommunications Update Service (TUS). Note that CVE remediations are limited to those packages on the EUS Package Inclusion List.

What is different?

Previously, Red Hat was selective with respect to which Important-classified CVEs were addressed.

This change is reflected on the Red Hat Enterprise Life Cycle page where you can read more about all of the phases of the RHEL product and extended support offerings.

What’s next?

While this policy starts with RHEL, we do hope to expand coverage over time to additional Red Hat products.

At this time, Extended Life-cycle Support (ELS) is not included in this expanded CVE coverage. ELS customers are still entitled to Critical CVE fixes or remediations.

This policy is effective for new CVE issues addressed after Oct. 1, 2019. Customers with questions about CVEs with a classification of Important that were closed prior to Oct. 1, 2019 may contact Red Hat through normal support channels.

Mark Thacker is product manager, Security Experience, Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat.