RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2016:2124)

high Nessus Plugin ID 94431

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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-2016:2124 advisory.

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

Security Fix(es):

* A race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel's memory subsystem handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. An unprivileged, local user could use this flaw to gain write access to otherwise read-only memory mappings and thus increase their privileges on the system.
(CVE-2016-5195, Important)

* It was found that stacking a file system over procfs in the Linux kernel could lead to a kernel stack overflow due to deep nesting, as demonstrated by mounting ecryptfs over procfs and creating a recursion by mapping /proc/environ. An unprivileged, local user could potentially use this flaw to escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2016-1583, Important)

Red Hat would like to thank Phil Oester for reporting CVE-2016-5195.

Bug Fix(es):

* In some cases, a kernel crash or file system corruption occurred when running journal mode 'ordered'.
The kernel crash was caused by a null pointer dereference due to a race condition between two journal functions. The file system corruption occurred due to a race condition between the do_get_write_access() function and buffer writeout. This update fixes both race conditions. As a result, neither the kernel crash, nor the file system corruption now occur. (BZ#1067708)

* Prior to this update, some Global File System 2 (GFS2) files had incorrect time stamp values due to two problems with handling time stamps of such files. The first problem concerned the atime time stamp, which ended up with an arbitrary value ahead of the actual value, when a GFS2 file was accessed. The second problem was related to the mtime and ctime time stamp updates, which got lost when a GFS2 file was written to from one node and read from or written to from another node. With this update, a set of patches has been applied that fix these problems. As a result, the time stamps of GFS2 files are now handled correctly. (BZ#1374861)

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-2016:2124.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 94431

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2016-2124.nasl

Version: 2.17

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 10/31/2016

Updated: 3/10/2025

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Critical

Score: 9.8

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.2

Temporal Score: 6.3

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2016-5195

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 7.5

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:H/RL:O/RC:C

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2016-1583

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 Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 10/28/2016

CISA Known Exploited Vulnerability Due Dates: 3/24/2022

Exploitable With

CANVAS (CANVAS)

Core Impact

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2016-1583, CVE-2016-5195

CWE: 121

IAVA: 2016-A-0306-S

RHSA: 2016:2124

Detections

Analytics