Red Hat Security Advisory 2016-1204-01 – The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments is a remote display protocol for virtual environments. SPICE users can access a virtualized desktop or server from the local system or any system with network access to the server. SPICE is used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for viewing virtualized guests running on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor or on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors. Security Fix: A memory allocation flaw, leading to a heap-based buffer overflow, was found in spice’s smartcard interaction, which runs under the QEMU-KVM context on the host. A user connecting to a guest VM using spice could potentially use this flaw to crash the QEMU-KVM process or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the host’s QEMU-KVM process.