Kexec allows for booting a Linux kernel from the context of an already running kernel. Kdump used the SSH "StrictHostKeyChecking=no" option when dumping to SSH targets, causing the target kdump server"s SSH host key not to be checked. This could make it easier for a man-in-the-middle attacker on the local network to impersonate the kdump SSH target server and possibly gain access to sensitive information in the vmcore dumps. mkdumprd created initrd files with world-readable permissions. A local user could possibly use this flaw to gain access to sensitive information, such as the private SSH key used to authenticate to a remote server when kdump was configured to dump to an SSH target. mkdumprd included unneeded sensitive files in the resulting initrd. This could lead to an information leak when initrd files were previously created with world-readable permissions. Note: With this update, only the SSH client configuration, known hosts files, and the SSH key configured via the newly introduced sshkey option in "/etc/kdump.conf" are included in the initrd. The default is the key generated when running the "service kdump propagate" command, "/root/.ssh/kdump_id_rsa". Red Hat would like to thank Kevan Carstensen for reporting these issues. This update also fixes several bugs and adds various enhancements. Space precludes documenting all of these changes in this advisory. Documentation for these bug fixes and enhancements will be available shortly from the Technical Notes document, linked to in the References section. All kexec-tools users should upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches to resolve these issues and add these enhancements.