The __qdisc_run function in net/sched/sch_generic.c in the Linux kernel before 2.6.25 on SMP machines allows local users to cause a denial of service (soft lockup) by sending a large amount of network traffic, as demonstrated by multiple simultaneous invocations of the Netperf benchmark application in UDP_STREAM mode.

The remote Oracle Linux 5 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the ELSA-2009-0264 advisory.

    - [security] introduce missing kfree (Jiri Pirko ) [480597 480598] {CVE-2009-0031}
    - [net] sctp: overflow with bad stream ID in FWD-TSN chunk (Eugene Teo ) [478804 478805] {CVE-2009-0065}
    - [net] add preemption point in qdisc_run (Jiri Pirko ) [477746 471398] {CVE-2008-5713}
    - [fs] hfsplus: fix buffer overflow with a corrupted image (Anton Arapov ) [469637 469638] {CVE-2008-4933}
    - [fs] hfsplus: check read_mapping_page return value (Anton Arapov ) [469644 469645] {CVE-2008-4934}

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Oracle Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

This update addresses the following security issues :

  - a memory leak in keyctl handling. A local user could use     this flaw to deplete kernel memory, eventually leading     to a denial of service. (CVE-2009-0031, Important)

  - a buffer overflow in the Linux kernel Partial Reliable     Stream Control Transmission Protocol (PR-SCTP)     implementation. This could, potentially, lead to a     denial of service if a Forward-TSN chunk is received     with a large stream ID. (CVE-2009-0065, Important)

  - a flaw when handling heavy network traffic on an SMP     system with many cores. An attacker who could send a     large amount of network traffic could create a denial of     service. (CVE-2008-5713, Important)

  - the code for the HFS and HFS Plus (HFS+) file systems     failed to properly handle corrupted data structures.
    This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of     service. (CVE-2008-4933, CVE-2008-5025, Low)

  - a flaw was found in the HFS Plus (HFS+) file system     implementation. This could, potentially, lead to a local     denial of service when write operations are performed.
    (CVE-2008-4934, Low)

  - when fput() was called to close a socket, the
    __scm_destroy() function in the Linux kernel could make     indirect recursive calls to itself. This could,     potentially, lead to a denial of service issue.
    (CVE-2008-5029, Important)

  - a flaw was found in the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)     subsystem. A local, unprivileged user could use the flaw     to listen on the same socket more than once, possibly     causing a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5079, Important)

  - a race condition was found in the Linux kernel 'inotify'     watch removal and umount implementation. This could     allow a local, unprivileged user to cause a privilege     escalation or a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5182,     Important)

** Bug fixes and enhancements are provided for :

  - support for specific NICs, including products from the     following manufacturers: Broadcom Chelsio Cisco Intel     Marvell NetXen Realtek Sun

  - Fiber Channel support, including support for Qlogic     qla2xxx, qla4xxx, and qla84xx HBAs and the FCoE, FCP,     and zFCP protocols.

  - support for various CPUs, including: AMD Opteron     processors with 45 nm SOI ('Shanghai') AMD Turion Ultra     processors Cell processors Intel Core i7 processors

  - Xen support, including issues specific to the IA64     platform, systems using AMD processors, and Dell     Optiplex GX280 systems

  - ext3, ext4, GFS2, NFS, and SPUFS

  - Infiniband (including eHCA, eHEA, and IPoIB) support

  - common I/O (CIO), direct I/O (DIO), and queued direct     I/O (qdio) support

  - the kernel distributed lock manager (DLM)

  - hardware issues with: SCSI, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), RAID     (including issues specific to Adaptec controllers), SATA     (including NCQ), PCI, audio, serial connections,     tape-drives, and USB

  - ACPI, some of a general nature and some related to     specific hardware including: certain Lenovo Thinkpad     notebooks, HP DC7700 systems, and certain machines based     on Intel Centrino processor technology.

  - CIFS, including Kerberos support and a tech-preview of     DFS support

  - networking support, including IPv6, PPPoE, and IPSec

  - support for Intel chipsets, including: Intel Cantiga     chipsets Intel Eagle Lake chipsets Intel i915 chipsets     Intel i965 chipsets Intel Ibex Peak chipsets Intel     chipsets offering QuickPath Interconnects (QPI)

  - device mapping issues, including some in device mapper     itself

  - various issues specific to IA64 and PPC

  - CCISS, including support for Compaq SMART Array     controllers P711m and P712m and other new hardware

  - various issues affecting specific HP systems, including:
    DL785G5 XW4800 XW8600 XW8600 XW9400

  - IOMMU support, including specific issues with AMD and     IBM Calgary hardware

  - the audit subsystem

  - DASD support

  - iSCSI support, including issues specific to Chelsio T3     adapters

  - LVM issues

  - SCTP management information base (MIB) support

  - issues with: autofs, kdump, kobject_add, libata, lpar,     ptrace, and utrace

  - platforms using Intel Enhanced Error Handling (EEH)

  - EDAC issues for AMD K8 and Intel i5000

  - ALSA, including support for new hardware

  - futex support

  - hugepage support

  - Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) support

  - issues affecting NEC/Stratus servers

  - OFED support

  - SELinux

  - various Virtio issues

  - when using the nfsd daemon in a clustered setup, kernel     panics appeared seemingly at random. These panics were     caused by a race condition in the device-mapper mirror     target.

  - the clock_gettime(CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID, ) syscall     returned a smaller timespec value than the result of     previous clock_gettime() function execution, which     resulted in a negative, and nonsensical, elapsed time     value.

  - nfs_create_rpc_client was called with a 'flavor'     parameter which was usually ignored and ended up     unconditionally creating the RPC client with an     AUTH_UNIX flavor. This caused problems on AUTH_GSS     mounts when the credentials needed to be refreshed. The     credops did not match the authorization type, which     resulted in the credops dereferencing an incorrect part     of the AUTH_UNIX rpc_auth struct.

  - when copy_user_c terminated prematurely due to reading     beyond the end of the user buffer and the kernel jumped     to the exception table entry, the rsi register was not     cleared. This resulted in exiting back to user code with     garbage in the rsi register.

  - the hexdump data in s390dbf traces was incomplete. The     length of the data traced was incorrect and the SAN     payload was read from a different place then it was     written to.

  - when using connected mode (CM) in IPoIB on ehca2     hardware, it was not possible to transmit any data.

  - when an application called fork() and pthread_create()     many times and, at some point, a thread forked a child     and then attempted to call the setpgid() function, then     this function failed and returned and ESRCH error value.

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to denial of service, privilege escalation, or information leak. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems :

  - CVE-2008-4307     Bryn M. Reeves reported a denial of service in the NFS     filesystem. Local users can trigger a kernel BUG() due     to a race condition in the do_setlk function.

  - CVE-2008-5395     Helge Deller discovered a denial of service condition     that allows local users on PA-RISC to crash the system     by attempting to unwind a stack containing userspace     addresses.

  - CVE-2008-5701     Vlad Malov reported an issue on 64-bit MIPS where a     local user could cause a system crash by crafting a     malicious binary which makes o32 syscalls with a number     less than 4000.

  - CVE-2008-5702     Zvonimir Rakamaric reported an off-by-one error in the     ib700wdt watchdog driver which allows local users to     cause a buffer underflow by making a specially crafted     WDIOC_SETTIMEOUT ioctl call.

  - CVE-2008-5713     Flavio Leitner discovered that a local user can cause a     denial of service by generating large amounts of traffic     on a large SMP system, resulting in soft lockups.

  - CVE-2009-0028     Chris Evans discovered a situation in which a child     process can send an arbitrary signal to its parent.

  - CVE-2009-0029     Christian Borntraeger discovered an issue effecting the     alpha, mips, powerpc, s390 and sparc64 architectures     that allows local users to cause a denial of service or     potentially gain elevated privileges.

  - CVE-2009-0031     Vegard Nossum discovered a memory leak in the keyctl     subsystem that allows local users to cause a denial of     service by consuming all available kernel memory.

  - CVE-2009-0065     Wei Yongjun discovered a memory overflow in the SCTP     implementation that can be triggered by remote users,     permitting remote code execution.

  - CVE-2009-0322     Pavel Roskin provided a fix for an issue in the dell_rbu     driver that allows a local user to cause a denial of     service (oops) by reading 0 bytes from a sysfs entry.

  - CVE-2009-0675     Roel Kluin discovered inverted logic in the skfddi     driver that permits local, unprivileged users to reset     the driver statistics.

  - CVE-2009-0676     Clement LECIGNE discovered a bug in the sock_getsockopt     function that may result in leaking sensitive kernel     memory.

  - CVE-2009-0834     Roland McGrath discovered an issue on amd64 kernels that     allows local users to circumvent system call audit     configurations which filter based on the syscall numbers     or argument details.

  - CVE-2009-0859     Jiri Olsa discovered that a local user can cause a     denial of service (system hang) using a SHM_INFO shmctl     call on kernels compiled with CONFIG_SHMEM disabled.
    This issue does not affect prebuilt Debian kernels.

  - CVE-2009-1192     Shaohua Li reported an issue in the AGP subsystem that     may allow local users to read sensitive kernel memory     due to a leak of uninitialized memory.

  - CVE-2009-1265     Thomas Pollet reported an overflow in the af_rose     implementation that allows remote attackers to retrieve     uninitialized kernel memory that may contain sensitive     data.

  - CVE-2009-1336     Trond Myklebust reported an issue in the encode_lookup()     function in the nfs server subsystem that allows local     users to cause a denial of service (oops in     encode_lookup()) by use of a long filename.

  - CVE-2009-1337     Oleg Nesterov discovered an issue in the exit_notify     function that allows local users to send an arbitrary     signal to a process by running a program that modifies     the exit_signal field and then uses an exec system call     to launch a setuid application.

  - CVE-2009-1439     Pavan Naregundi reported an issue in the CIFS filesystem     code that allows remote users to overwrite memory via a     long nativeFileSystem field in a Tree Connect response     during mount.

Hugo Dias discovered that the ATM subsystem did not correctly manage socket counts. A local attacker could exploit this to cause a system hang, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5079)

It was discovered that the libertas wireless driver did not correctly handle beacon and probe responses. A physically near-by attacker could generate specially crafted wireless network traffic and cause a denial of service. Ubuntu 6.06 was not affected. (CVE-2008-5134)

It was discovered that the inotify subsystem contained watch removal race conditions. A local attacker could exploit this to crash the system, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5182)

Dann Frazier discovered that in certain situations sendmsg did not correctly release allocated memory. A local attacker could exploit this to force the system to run out of free memory, leading to a denial of service. Ubuntu 6.06 was not affected. (CVE-2008-5300)

It was discovered that the ATA subsystem did not correctly set timeouts. A local attacker could exploit this to cause a system hang, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5700)

It was discovered that the ib700 watchdog timer did not correctly check buffer sizes. A local attacker could send a specially crafted ioctl to the device to cause a system crash, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5702)

It was discovered that in certain situations the network scheduler did not correctly handle very large levels of traffic. A local attacker could produce a high volume of UDP traffic resulting in a system hang, leading to a denial of service. Ubuntu 8.04 was not affected.
(CVE-2008-5713).

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Updated kernel packages that resolve several security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

This update addresses the following security issues :

* a memory leak in keyctl handling. A local user could use this flaw to deplete kernel memory, eventually leading to a denial of service.
(CVE-2009-0031, Important)

* a buffer overflow in the Linux kernel Partial Reliable Stream Control Transmission Protocol (PR-SCTP) implementation. This could, potentially, lead to a denial of service if a Forward-TSN chunk is received with a large stream ID. (CVE-2009-0065, Important)

* a flaw when handling heavy network traffic on an SMP system with many cores. An attacker who could send a large amount of network traffic could create a denial of service. (CVE-2008-5713, Important)

* the code for the HFS and HFS Plus (HFS+) file systems failed to properly handle corrupted data structures. This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service. (CVE-2008-4933, CVE-2008-5025, Low)

* a flaw was found in the HFS Plus (HFS+) file system implementation.
This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service when write operations are performed. (CVE-2008-4934, Low)

In addition, these updated packages fix the following bugs :

* when using the nfsd daemon in a clustered setup, kernel panics appeared seemingly at random. These panics were caused by a race condition in the device-mapper mirror target.

* the clock_gettime(CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID, ) syscall returned a smaller timespec value than the result of previous clock_gettime() function execution, which resulted in a negative, and nonsensical, elapsed time value.

* nfs_create_rpc_client was called with a 'flavor' parameter which was usually ignored and ended up unconditionally creating the RPC client with an AUTH_UNIX flavor. This caused problems on AUTH_GSS mounts when the credentials needed to be refreshed. The credops did not match the authorization type, which resulted in the credops dereferencing an incorrect part of the AUTH_UNIX rpc_auth struct.

* when copy_user_c terminated prematurely due to reading beyond the end of the user buffer and the kernel jumped to the exception table entry, the rsi register was not cleared. This resulted in exiting back to user code with garbage in the rsi register.

* the hexdump data in s390dbf traces was incomplete. The length of the data traced was incorrect and the SAN payload was read from a different place then it was written to.

* when using connected mode (CM) in IPoIB on ehca2 hardware, it was not possible to transmit any data.

* when an application called fork() and pthread_create() many times and, at some point, a thread forked a child and then attempted to call the setpgid() function, then this function failed and returned and ESRCH error value.

Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. Note: for this update to take effect, the system must be rebooted.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
67800	Oracle Linux 5 : kernel (ELSA-2009-0264)	Nessus	Oracle Linux Local Security Checks	medium
60532	Scientific Linux Security Update : kernel on SL5.x i386/x86_64	Nessus	Scientific Linux Local Security Checks	critical
38722	Debian DSA-1794-1 : linux-2.6 - denial of service/privilege escalation/information leak	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	critical
36454	Ubuntu 6.06 LTS / 7.10 / 8.04 LTS : linux-source-2.6.15/22, linux vulnerabilities (USN-714-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	critical
35645	RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2009:0264)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	critical

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2008-5713

medium

Tenable Plugins

medium

critical

critical

critical

critical