Updated kernel packages that fix various security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

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

These updated packages fix the following security issues :

* the absence of a protection mechanism when attempting to access a critical section of code has been found in the Linux kernel open file descriptors control mechanism, fcntl. This could allow a local unprivileged user to simultaneously execute code, which would otherwise be protected against parallel execution. As well, a race condition when handling locks in the Linux kernel fcntl functionality, may have allowed a process belonging to a local unprivileged user to gain re-ordered access to the descriptor table. (CVE-2008-1669, Important)

* a possible hypervisor panic was found in the Linux kernel. A privileged user of a fully virtualized guest could initiate a stress-test File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transfer between the guest and the hypervisor, possibly leading to hypervisor panic.
(CVE-2008-1619, Important)

* the absence of a protection mechanism when attempting to access a critical section of code, as well as a race condition, have been found in the Linux kernel file system event notifier, dnotify. This could allow a local unprivileged user to get inconsistent data, or to send arbitrary signals to arbitrary system processes. (CVE-2008-1375, Important)

Red Hat would like to thank Nick Piggin for responsibly disclosing the following issue :

* when accessing kernel memory locations, certain Linux kernel drivers registering a fault handler did not perform required range checks. A local unprivileged user could use this flaw to gain read or write access to arbitrary kernel memory, or possibly cause a kernel crash.
(CVE-2008-0007, Important)

* the absence of sanity-checks was found in the hypervisor block backend driver, when running 32-bit paravirtualized guests on a 64-bit host. The number of blocks to be processed per one request from guest to host, or vice-versa, was not checked for its maximum value, which could have allowed a local privileged user of the guest operating system to cause a denial of service. (CVE-2007-5498, Important)

* it was discovered that the Linux kernel handled string operations in the opposite way to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). This could allow a local unprivileged user to cause memory corruption.
(CVE-2008-1367, Low)

As well, these updated packages fix the following bugs :

* on IBM System z architectures, when running QIOASSIST enabled QDIO devices in an IBM z/VM environment, the output queue stalled under heavy load. This caused network performance to degrade, possibly causing network hangs and outages.

* multiple buffer overflows were discovered in the neofb video driver.
It was not possible for an unprivileged user to exploit these issues, and as such, they have not been handled as security issues.

* when running Microsoft Windows in a HVM, a bug in vmalloc/vfree caused network performance to degrade.

* on certain architectures, a bug in the libATA sata_nv driver may have caused infinite reboots, and an 'ata1: CPB flags CMD err flags 0x11' error.

* repeatedly hot-plugging a PCI Express card may have caused 'Bad DLLP' errors.

* a NULL pointer dereference in NFS, which may have caused applications to crash, has been resolved.

* when attempting to kexec reboot, either manually or via a panic-triggered kdump, the Unisys ES7000/one hanged after rebooting in the new kernel, after printing the 'Memory: 32839688k/33685504k available' line.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues.

Updated kernel packages that fix various security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

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

These updated packages fix the following security issues :

* the absence of a protection mechanism when attempting to access a critical section of code has been found in the Linux kernel open file descriptors control mechanism, fcntl. This could allow a local unprivileged user to simultaneously execute code, which would otherwise be protected against parallel execution. As well, a race condition when handling locks in the Linux kernel fcntl functionality, may have allowed a process belonging to a local unprivileged user to gain re-ordered access to the descriptor table. (CVE-2008-1669, Important)

* on AMD64 architectures, the possibility of a kernel crash was discovered by testing the Linux kernel process-trace ability. This could allow a local unprivileged user to cause a denial of service (kernel crash). (CVE-2008-1615, Important)

* the absence of a protection mechanism when attempting to access a critical section of code, as well as a race condition, have been found in the Linux kernel file system event notifier, dnotify. This could allow a local unprivileged user to get inconsistent data, or to send arbitrary signals to arbitrary system processes. (CVE-2008-1375, Important)

Red Hat would like to thank Nick Piggin for responsibly disclosing the following issue :

* when accessing kernel memory locations, certain Linux kernel drivers registering a fault handler did not perform required range checks. A local unprivileged user could use this flaw to gain read or write access to arbitrary kernel memory, or possibly cause a kernel crash.
(CVE-2008-0007, Important)

* the possibility of a kernel crash was found in the Linux kernel IPsec protocol implementation, due to improper handling of fragmented ESP packets. When an attacker controlling an intermediate router fragmented these packets into very small pieces, it would cause a kernel crash on the receiving node during packet reassembly.
(CVE-2007-6282, Important)

* a flaw in the MOXA serial driver could allow a local unprivileged user to perform privileged operations, such as replacing firmware.
(CVE-2005-0504, Important)

As well, these updated packages fix the following bugs :

* multiple buffer overflows in the neofb driver have been resolved. It was not possible for an unprivileged user to exploit these issues, and as such, they have not been handled as security issues.

* a kernel panic, due to inconsistent detection of AGP aperture size, has been resolved.

* a race condition in UNIX domain sockets may have caused 'recv()' to return zero. In clustered configurations, this may have caused unexpected failovers.

* to prevent link storms, network link carrier events were delayed by up to one second, causing unnecessary packet loss. Now, link carrier events are scheduled immediately.

* a client-side race on blocking locks caused large time delays on NFS file systems.

* in certain situations, the libATA sata_nv driver may have sent commands with duplicate tags, which were rejected by SATA devices.
This may have caused infinite reboots.

* running the 'service network restart' command may have caused networking to fail.

* a bug in NFS caused cached information about directories to be stored for too long, causing wrong attributes to be read.

* on systems with a large highmem/lowmem ratio, NFS write performance may have been very slow when using small files.

* a bug, which caused network hangs when the system clock was wrapped around zero, has been resolved.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues.

A race condition in the directory notification subsystem (dnotify) in Linux kernel 2.6.x before 2.6.24.6, and 2.6.25 before 2.6.25.1, allows local users to cause a denial of service (OOPS) and possibly gain privileges via unspecified vectors. (CVE-2008-1375)

The Linux kernel before 2.6.25.2 does not apply a certain protection mechanism for fcntl functionality, which allows local users to (1) execute code in parallel or (2) exploit a race condition to obtain re-ordered access to the descriptor table. (CVE-2008-1669)

Additionaly, the updated kernel for Mandriva Linux 2008.0 has bug fixes for sound on NEC S970 systems, an oops in module rt73, and the
-devel package fixes DKMS builds.

To update your kernel, please follow the directions located at :

http://www.mandriva.com/en/security/kernelupdate

The remote CentOS system is missing a security update which has been documented in Red Hat advisory RHSA-2008-0211.

The remote CentOS system is missing a security update which has been documented in Red Hat advisory RHSA-2008-0233.

The remote CentOS system is missing a security update which has been documented in Red Hat advisory RHSA-2008-0237.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Published	Updated	Severity
43681	CentOS 5 : kernel (CESA-2008:0233)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	1/6/2010	1/4/2021	high
32161	RHEL 5 : kernel (RHSA-2008:0233)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	5/9/2008	1/14/2021	high
32162	RHEL 4 : kernel (RHSA-2008:0237)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	5/9/2008	1/14/2021	high
37544	Mandriva Linux Security Advisory : kernel (MDVSA-2008:104)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	4/23/2009	1/6/2021	medium
801449	CentOS RHSA-2008-0211 Security Check	Log Correlation Engine	Generic			high
801450	CentOS RHSA-2008-0233 Security Check	Log Correlation Engine	Generic			high
801451	CentOS RHSA-2008-0237 Security Check	Log Correlation Engine	Generic			high

Detections

Analytics

Plugins Search

high

high

high

medium

high

high

high