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.

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RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2009:1106)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 39430

Version 1.30