RHEL 6 : kernel (RHSA-2013:1519)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 78978

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Synopsis

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

Description

Updated kernel packages that fix two security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Extended Update Support.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

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

* A race condition was found in the way asynchronous I/O and fallocate() interacted when using the ext4 file system. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to expose random data from an extent whose data blocks have not yet been written, and thus contain data from a deleted file. (CVE-2012-4508, Important)

* An information leak flaw was found in the way Linux kernel's device mapper subsystem, under certain conditions, interpreted data written to snapshot block devices. An attacker could use this flaw to read data from disk blocks in free space, which are normally inaccessible.
(CVE-2013-4299, Moderate)

Red Hat would like to thank Theodore Ts'o for reporting CVE-2012-4508, and Fujitsu for reporting CVE-2013-4299. Upstream acknowledges Dmitry Monakhov as the original reporter of CVE-2012-4508.

This update also fixes the following bugs :

* When the Audit subsystem was under heavy load, it could loop infinitely in the audit_log_start() function instead of failing over to the error recovery code. This would cause soft lockups in the kernel. With this update, the timeout condition in the audit_log_start() function has been modified to properly fail over when necessary. (BZ#1017898)

* When handling Memory Type Range Registers (MTRRs), the stop_one_cpu_nowait() function could potentially be executed in parallel with the stop_machine() function, which resulted in a deadlock. The MTRR handling logic now uses the stop_machine() function and makes use of mutual exclusion to avoid the aforementioned deadlock. (BZ#1017902)

* Power-limit notification interrupts were enabled by default. This could lead to degradation of system performance or even render the system unusable on certain platforms, such as Dell PowerEdge servers.
Power-limit notification interrupts have been disabled by default and a new kernel command line parameter 'int_pln_enable' has been added to allow users to observe these events using the existing system counters. Power-limit notification messages are also no longer displayed on the console. The affected platforms no longer suffer from degraded system performance due to this problem. (BZ#1020519)

* Package level thermal and power limit events are not defined as MCE errors for the x86 architecture. However, the mcelog utility erroneously reported these events as MCE errors with the following message :

kernel: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged

Package level thermal and power limit events are no longer reported as MCE errors by mcelog. When these events are triggered, they are now reported only in the respective counters in sysfs (specifically, /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu/thermal_throttle/). (BZ#1021950)

* An insufficiently designed calculation in the CPU accelerator could cause an arithmetic overflow in the set_cyc2ns_scale() function if the system uptime exceeded 208 days prior to using kexec to boot into a new kernel. This overflow led to a kernel panic on systems using the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) clock source, primarily systems using Intel Xeon E5 processors that do not reset TSC on soft power cycles. A patch has been applied to modify the calculation so that this arithmetic overflow and kernel panic can no longer occur under these circumstances. (BZ#1024453)

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.

Solution

Update the affected packages.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 78978

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2013-1519.nasl

Version: 1.14

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 11/8/2014

Updated: 1/14/2021

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: 4.4

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:P

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:python-perf-debuginfo, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-doc, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:perf, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:perf-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-headers, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-firmware, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debuginfo-common-i686, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debuginfo-common-x86_64, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:python-perf, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debuginfo-common-s390x, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6.2

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

Patch Publication Date: 11/13/2013

Vulnerability Publication Date: 12/21/2012

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2012-4508, CVE-2013-4299

RHSA: 2013:1519

Detections

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