RHEL 6 : kernel (RHSA-2015:1272)

high Nessus Plugin ID 84936

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Synopsis

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

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2015:1272 advisory.

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

* A flaw was found in the way Linux kernel's Transparent Huge Pages (THP) implementation handled non-huge page migration. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to crash the kernel by migrating transparent hugepages.
(CVE-2014-3940, Moderate)

* A buffer overflow flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel's eCryptfs implementation decoded encrypted file names. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to crash the system or, potentially, escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2014-9683, Moderate)

* A race condition flaw was found between the chown and execve system calls. When changing the owner of a setuid user binary to root, the race condition could momentarily make the binary setuid root. A local, unprivileged user could potentially use this flaw to escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2015-3339, Moderate)

* Multiple out-of-bounds write flaws were found in the way the Cherry Cymotion keyboard driver, KYE/Genius device drivers, Logitech device drivers, Monterey Genius KB29E keyboard driver, Petalynx Maxter remote control driver, and Sunplus wireless desktop driver handled HID reports with an invalid report descriptor size. An attacker with physical access to the system could use either of these flaws to write data past an allocated memory buffer. (CVE-2014-3184, Low)

* An information leak flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel's Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) implementation handled access of the user control's state. A local, privileged user could use this flaw to leak kernel memory to user space. (CVE-2014-4652, Low)

* It was found that the espfix functionality could be bypassed by installing a 16-bit RW data segment into GDT instead of LDT (which espfix checks), and using that segment on the stack. A local, unprivileged user could potentially use this flaw to leak kernel stack addresses.
(CVE-2014-8133, Low)

* An information leak flaw was found in the Linux kernel's IEEE 802.11 wireless networking implementation. When software encryption was used, a remote attacker could use this flaw to leak up to 8 bytes of plaintext.
(CVE-2014-8709, Low)

* It was found that the Linux kernel KVM subsystem's sysenter instruction emulation was not sufficient. An unprivileged guest user could use this flaw to escalate their privileges by tricking the hypervisor to emulate a SYSENTER instruction in 16-bit mode, if the guest OS did not initialize the SYSENTER model-specific registers (MSRs). Note: Certified guest operating systems for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM do initialize the SYSENTER MSRs and are thus not vulnerable to this issue when running on a KVM hypervisor. (CVE-2015-0239, Low)

Red Hat would like to thank Andy Lutomirski for reporting the CVE-2014-8133 issue, and Nadav Amit for reporting the CVE-2015-0239 issue.

This update fixes several hundred bugs and adds numerous enhancements.
Refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 Release Notes for information on the most significant of these changes, and the following Knowledgebase article for further information:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/1466073

All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues and add these enhancements. 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 affected packages.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 84936

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2015-1272.nasl

Version: 2.14

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 7/23/2015

Updated: 3/20/2025

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.0

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Moderate

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.2

Temporal Score: 4.9

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2015-3339

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7

Temporal Score: 6.3

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/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, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-headers, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-firmware, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-bootwrapper, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:python-perf, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-kdump-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:kernel-debug, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:perf

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: 7/22/2015

Vulnerability Publication Date: 6/5/2014

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2014-3184, CVE-2014-3940, CVE-2014-4652, CVE-2014-8133, CVE-2014-8709, CVE-2014-9683, CVE-2015-0239, CVE-2015-3339

BID: 67786, 68170, 69768, 70965, 71684, 72643, 72842, 74243

CWE: 119, 193, 362, 391

RHSA: 2015:1272

Detections

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