RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2009:1106)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 39430

Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates for kernel.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2009:1106 advisory.

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

Security fixes:

* several flaws were found in the way the Linux kernel CIFS implementation handles Unicode strings. CIFS clients convert Unicode strings sent by a server to their local character sets, and then write those strings into memory. If a malicious server sent a long enough string, it could write past the end of the target memory region and corrupt other memory areas, possibly leading to a denial of service or privilege escalation on the client mounting the CIFS share. (CVE-2009-1439, CVE-2009-1633, Important)

* the Linux kernel Network File System daemon (nfsd) implementation did not drop the CAP_MKNOD capability when handling requests from local, unprivileged users. This flaw could possibly lead to an information leak or privilege escalation. (CVE-2009-1072, Moderate)

* Frank Filz reported the NFSv4 client was missing a file permission check for the execute bit in some situations. This could allow local, unprivileged users to run non-executable files on NFSv4 mounted file systems. (CVE-2009-1630, Moderate)

* a missing check was found in the hypervisor_callback() function in the Linux kernel provided by the kernel-xen package. This could cause a denial of service of a 32-bit guest if an application running in that guest accesses a certain memory location in the kernel. (CVE-2009-1758, Moderate)

* a flaw was found in the AGPGART driver. The agp_generic_alloc_page() and agp_generic_alloc_pages() functions did not zero out the memory pages they allocate, which may later be available to user-space processes. This flaw could possibly lead to an information leak. (CVE-2009-1192, Low)

Bug fixes:

* a race in the NFS client between destroying cached access rights and unmounting an NFS file system could have caused a system crash. Busy inodes messages may have been logged. (BZ#498653)

* nanosleep() could sleep several milliseconds less than the specified time on Intel Itanium-based systems. (BZ#500349)

* LEDs for disk drives in AHCI mode may have displayed a fault state when there were no faults. (BZ#500120)

* ptrace_do_wait() reported tasks were stopped each time the process doing the trace called wait(), instead of reporting it once. (BZ#486945)

* epoll_wait() may have caused a system lockup and problems for applications. (BZ#497322)

* missing capabilities could possibly allow users with an fsuid other than 0 to perform actions on some file system types that would otherwise be prevented. (BZ#497271)

* on NFS mounted file systems, heavy write loads may have blocked nfs_getattr() for long periods, causing commands that use stat(2), such as ls, to hang. (BZ#486926)

* in rare circumstances, if an application performed multiple O_DIRECT reads per virtual memory page and also performed fork(2), the buffer storing the result of the I/O may have ended up with invalid data.
(BZ#486921)

* when using GFS2, gfs2_quotad may have entered an uninterpretable sleep state. (BZ#501742)

* with this update, get_random_int() is more random and no longer uses a common seed value, reducing the possibility of predicting the values returned. (BZ#499783)

* the -fwrapv flag was added to the gcc build options to prevent gcc from optimizing away wrapping. (BZ#501751)

* a kernel panic when enabling and disabling iSCSI paths. (BZ#502916)

* using the Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5704 network device with the tg3 driver caused high system load and very bad performance. (BZ#502837)

* /proc/[pid]/maps and /proc/[pid]/smaps can only be read by processes able to use the ptrace() call on a given process; however, certain information from /proc/[pid]/stat and /proc/[pid]/wchan could be used to reconstruct memory maps. (BZ#499546)

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

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise 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.

Solution

Update the RHEL kernel package based on the guidance in RHSA-2009:1106.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 39430

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2009-1106.nasl

Version: 1.30

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 6/17/2009

Updated: 11/4/2024

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.7

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 6.1

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:N/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2009-3238

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.5

Temporal Score: 5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-xen-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-pae, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-headers, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-pae-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-xen

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 6/16/2009

Vulnerability Publication Date: 3/24/2009

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2009-1072, CVE-2009-1192, CVE-2009-1439, CVE-2009-1630, CVE-2009-1633, CVE-2009-1758, CVE-2009-3238

BID: 34205, 34453, 34612, 34673, 34934, 34957

CWE: 119, 330

RHSA: 2009:1106

Detections

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