Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a denial of service, sensitive memory leak or privilege escalation. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems :

  - CVE-2009-1883     Solar Designer discovered a missing capability check in     the z90crypt driver or s390 systems. This vulnerability     may allow a local user to gain elevated privileges.

  - CVE-2009-2909     Arjan van de Ven discovered an issue in the AX.25     protocol implementation. A specially crafted call to     setsockopt() can result in a denial of service (kernel     oops).

  - CVE-2009-3001     Jiri Slaby fixed a sensitive memory leak issue in the     ANSI/IEEE 802.2 LLC implementation. This is not     exploitable in the Debian lenny kernel as root     privileges are required to exploit this issue.

  - CVE-2009-3002     Eric Dumazet fixed several sensitive memory leaks in the     IrDA, X.25 PLP (Rose), NET/ROM, Acorn Econet/AUN, and     Controller Area Network (CAN) implementations. Local     users can exploit these issues to gain access to kernel     memory.

  - CVE-2009-3228     Eric Dumazet reported an instance of uninitialized     kernel memory in the network packet scheduler. Local     users may be able to exploit this issue to read the     contents of sensitive kernel memory.

  - CVE-2009-3238     Linus Torvalds provided a change to the get_random_int()     function to increase its randomness.

  - CVE-2009-3286     Eric Paris discovered an issue with the NFSv4 server     implementation. When an O_EXCL create fails, files may     be left with corrupted permissions, possibly granting     unintentional privileges to other local users.

  - CVE-2009-3547     Earl Chew discovered a NULL pointer dereference issue in     the pipe_rdwr_open function which can be used by local     users to gain elevated privileges.

  - CVE-2009-3612     Jiri Pirko discovered a typo in the initialization of a     structure in the netlink subsystem that may allow local     users to gain access to sensitive kernel memory.

  - CVE-2009-3621     Tomoki Sekiyama discovered a deadlock condition in the     UNIX domain socket implementation. Local users can     exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial of service     (system hang).

Updated kernel packages that fix several security issues and multiple bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.

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.

Security fixes :

* when fput() was called to close a socket, the __scm_destroy() function in the Linux kernel could make indirect recursive calls to itself. This could, potentially, lead to a denial of service issue.
(CVE-2008-5029, Important)

* the sendmsg() function in the Linux kernel did not block during UNIX socket garbage collection. This could, potentially, lead to a local denial of service. (CVE-2008-5300, Important)

* the exit_notify() function in the Linux kernel did not properly reset the exit signal if a process executed a set user ID (setuid) application before exiting. This could allow a local, unprivileged user to elevate their privileges. (CVE-2009-1337, Important)

* a flaw was found in the Intel PRO/1000 network driver in the Linux kernel. Frames with sizes near the MTU of an interface may be split across multiple hardware receive descriptors. Receipt of such a frame could leak through a validation check, leading to a corruption of the length check. A remote attacker could use this flaw to send a specially crafted packet that would cause a denial of service or code execution. (CVE-2009-1385, Important)

* the ADDR_COMPAT_LAYOUT and MMAP_PAGE_ZERO flags were not cleared when a setuid or setgid program was executed. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to bypass the mmap_min_addr protection mechanism and perform a NULL pointer dereference attack, or bypass the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) security feature.
(CVE-2009-1895, Important)

* it was discovered that, when executing a new process, the clear_child_tid pointer in the Linux kernel is not cleared. If this pointer points to a writable portion of the memory of the new program, the kernel could corrupt four bytes of memory, possibly leading to a local denial of service or privilege escalation. (CVE-2009-2848, Important)

* missing initialization flaws were found in getname() implementations in the IrDA sockets, AppleTalk DDP protocol, NET/ROM protocol, and ROSE protocol implementations in the Linux kernel. Certain data structures in these getname() implementations were not initialized properly before being copied to user-space. These flaws could lead to an information leak. (CVE-2009-3002, Important)

* a NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in each of the following functions in the Linux kernel: pipe_read_open(), pipe_write_open(), and pipe_rdwr_open(). When the mutex lock is not held, the i_pipe pointer could be released by other processes before it is used to update the pipe's reader and writer counters. This could lead to a local denial of service or privilege escalation. (CVE-2009-3547, Important)

Bug fixes :

* this update adds the mmap_min_addr tunable and restriction checks to help prevent unprivileged users from creating new memory mappings below the minimum address. This can help prevent the exploitation of NULL pointer dereference bugs. Note that mmap_min_addr is set to zero (disabled) by default for backwards compatibility. (BZ#512642)

* a bridge reference count problem in IPv6 has been fixed. (BZ#457010)

* enforce null-termination of user-supplied arguments to setsockopt().
(BZ#505514)

* the gcc flag '-fno-delete-null-pointer-checks' was added to the kernel build options. This prevents gcc from optimizing out NULL pointer checks after the first use of a pointer. NULL pointer bugs are often exploited by attackers. Keeping these checks is a safety measure. (BZ#511185)

* a check has been added to the IPv4 code to make sure that rt is not NULL, to help prevent future bugs in functions that call ip_append_data() from being exploitable. (BZ#520300)

Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

This update fixes a several security issues and various bugs in the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP 2 kernel.

The following security issues were fixed: CVE-2009-3547: A race condition during pipe open could be used by local attackers to elevate privileges.

  - On x86_64 systems a information leak of high register     contents (upper 32bit) was fixed. (CVE-2009-2910)

  - The randomness of the ASLR methods used in the kernel     was increased. (CVE-2009-3238)

  - A information leak from the kernel due to uninitialized     memory in AGP handling was fixed. (CVE-2009-1192)

  - A signed comparison in the ax25 sockopt handler was     fixed which could be used to crash the kernel or     potentially execute code. (CVE-2009-2909)

  - The execve function in the Linux kernel did not properly     clear the current->clear_child_tid pointer, which allows     local users to cause a denial of service (memory     corruption) or possibly gain privileges via a clone     system call with CLONE_CHILD_SETTID or     CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID enabled, which is not properly     handled during thread creation and exit. (CVE-2009-2848)

  - Fixed various sockethandler getname leaks, which could     disclose memory previously used by the kernel or other     userland processes to the local attacker.
    (CVE-2009-3002)

  - Multiple buffer overflows in the cifs subsystem in the     Linux kernel allow remote CIFS servers to cause a denial     of service (memory corruption) and possibly have     unspecified other impact via (1) a malformed Unicode     string, related to Unicode string area alignment in     fs/cifs/sess.c; or (2) long Unicode characters, related     to fs/cifs/cifssmb.c and the cifs_readdir function in     fs/cifs/readdir.c. (CVE-2009-1633)

Also see the RPM changelog for more changes.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Published	Updated	Severity
44794	Debian DSA-1929-1 : linux-2.6 - privilege escalation/denial of service/sensitive memory leak	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	2/24/2010	1/4/2021	high
67070	CentOS 3 : kernel (CESA-2009:1550)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	6/29/2013	1/4/2021	high
59140	SuSE 10 Security Update : Linux kernel (ZYPP Patch Number 6636)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	5/17/2012	1/14/2021	high

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