Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
Rabin Vincent, Robert Swiecki, Russell King discovered that the ftrace subsystem of the Linux kernel does not properly handle private syscall numbers. A local user could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (OOPS). (CVE-2014-7826)
12 December 2014
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
Rabin Vincent, Robert Swiecki, Russell King discovered that the ftrace subsystem of the Linux kernel does not properly handle private syscall numbers. A local user could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (OOPS). (CVE-2014-7826)
Rabin Vincent, Robert Swiecki, Russell Kinglaw discovered a flaw in how the perf subsystem of the Linux kernel handles private systecall numbers. A local user could exploit this to cause a denial of service (OOPS) or bypass ASLR protections via a crafted application. (CVE-2014-7825)
A null pointer dereference flaw was discovered in the the Linux kernel’s SCTP implementation when ASCONF is used. A remote attacker could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (system crash) via a malformed INIT chunk. (CVE-2014-7841)
A stack buffer overflow was discovered in the ioctl command handling for the Technotrend/Hauppauge USB DEC devices driver. A local user could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly gain privileges. (CVE-2014-8884)
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
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.