linux vulnerabilities

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2014-5207   CVE-2014-5206  

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.

Eric W. Biederman discovered a flaw with the mediation of mount flags in the Linux kernel’s user namespace subsystem. An unprivileged user could exploit this flaw to by-pass mount restrictions, and potentially gain administrative privileges. (CVE-2014-5207)

18 August 2014

linux vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Summary

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.

Software Description

  • linux - Linux kernel

Details

Eric W. Biederman discovered a flaw with the mediation of mount flags in the Linux kernel’s user namespace subsystem. An unprivileged user could exploit this flaw to by-pass mount restrictions, and potentially gain administrative privileges. (CVE-2014-5207)

Kenton Varda discovered a flaw with read-only bind mounds when used with user namespaces. An unprivileged local user could exploit this flaw to gain full write privileges to a mount that should be read only. (CVE-2014-5206)

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
linux-image-3.13.0-34-generic - 3.13.0-34.60
linux-image-3.13.0-34-generic-lpae - 3.13.0-34.60
linux-image-3.13.0-34-lowlatency - 3.13.0-34.60
linux-image-3.13.0-34-powerpc-e500 - 3.13.0-34.60
linux-image-3.13.0-34-powerpc-e500mc - 3.13.0-34.60
linux-image-3.13.0-34-powerpc-smp - 3.13.0-34.60
linux-image-3.13.0-34-powerpc64-emb - 3.13.0-34.60
linux-image-3.13.0-34-powerpc64-smp - 3.13.0-34.60

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make all the necessary changes.

ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change the kernel updates have been given a new version number, which requires you to recompile and reinstall all third party kernel modules you might have installed. If you use linux-restricted-modules, you have to update that package as well to get modules which work with the new kernel version. Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages (e.g. linux-generic, linux-server, linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically perform this as well.

References