RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2014:0740)

high Nessus Plugin ID 74458

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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-2014:0740 advisory.

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

* A flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel's floppy driver handled user space provided data in certain error code paths while processing FDRAWCMD IOCTL commands. A local user with write access to /dev/fdX could use this flaw to free (using the kfree() function) arbitrary kernel memory.
(CVE-2014-1737, Important)

* It was found that the Linux kernel's floppy driver leaked internal kernel memory addresses to user space during the processing of the FDRAWCMD IOCTL command. A local user with write access to /dev/fdX could use this flaw to obtain information about the kernel heap arrangement. (CVE-2014-1738, Low)

Note: A local user with write access to /dev/fdX could use these two flaws (CVE-2014-1737 in combination with CVE-2014-1738) to escalate their privileges on the system.

* A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the rds_ib_laddr_check() function in the Linux kernel's implementation of Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS). A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to crash the system.
(CVE-2013-7339, Moderate)

Red Hat would like to thank Matthew Daley for reporting CVE-2014-1737 and CVE-2014-1738.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* A bug in the futex system call could result in an overflow when passing a very large positive timeout. As a consequence, the FUTEX_WAIT operation did not work as intended and the system call was timing out immediately.
A backported patch fixes this bug by limiting very large positive timeouts to the maximal supported value. (BZ#1091832)

* A new Linux Security Module (LSM) functionality related to the setrlimit hooks should produce a warning message when used by a third party module that could not cope with it. However, due to a programming error, the kernel could print this warning message when a process was setting rlimits for a different process, or if rlimits were modified by another than the main thread even though there was no incompatible third party module. This update fixes the relevant code and ensures that the kernel handles this warning message correctly. (BZ#1092869)

* Previously, the kernel was unable to detect KVM on system boot if the Hyper-V emulation was enabled. A patch has been applied to ensure that both KVM and Hyper-V hypervisors are now correctly detected during system boot. (BZ#1094152)

* A function in the RPC code responsible for verifying whether cached credentials match the current process did not perform the check correctly.
The code checked only whether the groups in the current process credentials appear in the same order as in the cached credentials but did not ensure that no other groups are present in the cached credentials. As a consequence, when accessing files in NFS mounts, a process with the same UID and GID as the original process but with a non-matching group list could have been granted an unauthorized access to a file, or under certain circumstances, the process could have been wrongly prevented from accessing the file. The incorrect test condition has been fixed and the problem can no longer occur. (BZ#1095062)

* When being under heavy load, some Fibre Channel storage devices, such as Hitachi and HP Open-V series, can send a logout (LOGO) message to the host system. However, due to a bug in the lpfc driver, this could result in a loss of active paths to the storage and the paths could not be recovered without manual intervention. This update corrects the lpfc driver to ensure automatic recovery of the lost paths to the storage in this scenario. (BZ#1096061)

All kernel users are advised to 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-2014:0740.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 74458

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2014-0740.nasl

Version: 1.14

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 6/11/2014

Updated: 11/4/2024

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.2

Temporal Score: 5.6

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2014-1737

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 7

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

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: 6/10/2014

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2013-7339, CVE-2014-1737, CVE-2014-1738

BID: 66351, 67300, 67302

RHSA: 2014:0740

Detections

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