Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Thank you for contacting us. A member of our team will be in touch shortly. Close

You have successfully unsubscribed! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates about Ubuntu and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

USN-864-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

5 December 2009

Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Releases

Packages

Details

It was discovered that the AX.25 network subsystem did not correctly
check integer signedness in certain setsockopt calls. A local attacker
could exploit this to crash the system, leading to a denial of service.
Ubuntu 9.10 was not affected. (CVE-2009-2909)

Jan Beulich discovered that the kernel could leak register contents to
32-bit processes that were switched to 64-bit mode. A local attacker
could run a specially crafted binary to read register values from an
earlier process, leading to a loss of privacy. (CVE-2009-2910)

Dave Jones discovered that the gdth SCSI driver did not correctly validate
array indexes in certain ioctl calls. A local attacker could exploit
this to crash the system or gain elevated privileges. (CVE-2009-3080)

Eric Dumazet and Jiri Pirko discovered that the TC and CLS subsystems
would leak kernel memory via uninitialized structure members. A local
attacker could exploit this to read several bytes of kernel memory,
leading to a loss of privacy. (CVE-2009-3228, CVE-2009-3612)

Earl Chew discovered race conditions in pipe handling. A local attacker
could exploit anonymous pipes via /proc/*/fd/ and crash the system or
gain root privileges. (CVE-2009-3547)

Dave Jones and Francois Romieu discovered that the r8169 network driver
could be made to leak kernel memory. A remote attacker could send a large
number of jumbo frames until the system memory was exhausted, leading
to a denial of service. Ubuntu 9.10 was not affected. (CVE-2009-3613).

Ben Hutchings discovered that the ATI Rage 128 video driver did not
correctly validate initialization states. A local attacker could
make specially crafted ioctl calls to crash the system or gain root
privileges. (CVE-2009-3620)

Tomoki Sekiyama discovered that Unix sockets did not correctly verify
namespaces. A local attacker could exploit this to cause a system hang,
leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2009-3621)

J. Bruce Fields discovered that NFSv4 did not correctly use the credential
cache. A local attacker using a mount with AUTH_NULL authentication
could exploit this to crash the system or gain root privileges. Only
Ubuntu 9.10 was affected. (CVE-2009-3623)

Alexander Zangerl discovered that the kernel keyring did not correctly
reference count. A local attacker could issue a series of specially
crafted keyring calls to crash the system or gain root privileges.
Only Ubuntu 9.10 was affected. (CVE-2009-3624)

David Wagner discovered that KVM did not correctly bounds-check CPUID
entries. A local attacker could exploit this to crash the system
or possibly gain elevated privileges. Ubuntu 6.06 and 9.10 were not
affected. (CVE-2009-3638)

Avi Kivity discovered that KVM did not correctly check privileges when
accessing debug registers. A local attacker could exploit this to
crash a host system from within a guest system, leading to a denial of
service. Ubuntu 6.06 and 9.10 were not affected. (CVE-2009-3722)

Philip Reisner discovered that the connector layer for uvesafb, pohmelfs,
dst, and dm did not correctly check capabilties. A local attacker could
exploit this to crash the system or gain elevated privileges. Ubuntu
6.06 was not affected. (CVE-2009-3725)

Trond Myklebust discovered that NFSv4 clients did not robustly
verify attributes. A malicious remote NFSv4 server could exploit
this to crash a client or gain root privileges. Ubuntu 9.10 was not
affected. (CVE-2009-3726)

Robin Getz discovered that NOMMU systems did not correctly validate
NULL pointers in do_mmap_pgoff calls. A local attacker could attempt to
allocate large amounts of memory to crash the system, leading to a denial
of service. Only Ubuntu 6.06 and 9.10 were affected. (CVE-2009-3888)

Joseph Malicki discovered that the MegaRAID SAS driver had
world-writable option files. A local attacker could exploit these
to disrupt the behavior of the controller, leading to a denial of
service. (CVE-2009-3889, CVE-2009-3939)

Roel Kluin discovered that the Hisax ISDN driver did not correctly
check the size of packets. A remote attacker could send specially
crafted packets to cause a system crash, leading to a denial of
service. (CVE-2009-4005)

Lennert Buytenhek discovered that certain 802.11 states were not handled
correctly. A physically-proximate remote attacker could send specially
crafted wireless traffic that would crash the system, leading to a denial
of service. Only Ubuntu 9.10 was affected. (CVE-2009-4026, CVE-2009-4027)

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 9.10
Ubuntu 9.04
Ubuntu 8.10
Ubuntu 8.04
Ubuntu 6.06

After a standard system upgrade you need to reboot your computer to
effect the necessary changes.

ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change (except for Ubuntu 6.06)
the kernel updates have been given a new version number, which requires
you to recompile and reinstall all third party kernel modules you
might have installed. If you use linux-restricted-modules, you have to
update that package as well to get modules which work with the new kernel
version. Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages
(e.g. linux-generic, linux-server, linux-powerpc), a standard system
upgrade will automatically perform this as well.

References

Join the discussion

Need help with your security needs?

Ubuntu Pro provides up to ten-year security coverage for over 23,000 open-source packages within the Ubuntu Main and Universe repositories.

Talk to an expert to find out what would work best for you

Further reading