Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a denial of service or privilege escalation. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems: CVE-2008-3527 Tavis Ormandy reported a local DoS and potential privilege escalation in the Virtual Dynamic Shared Objects (vDSO) implementation. CVE-2008-3528 Eugene Teo reported a local DoS issue in the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that causes the kernel to output error messages in an infinite loop. CVE-2008-4554 Milos Szeredi reported that the usage of splice() on files opened with O_APPEND allows users to write to the file at arbitrary offsets, enabling a bypass of possible assumed semantics of the O_APPEND flag. CVE-2008-4576 Vlad Yasevich reported an issue in the SCTP subsystem that may allow remote users to cause a local DoS by triggering a kernel oops. CVE-2008-4933 Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that causes the kernel to overrun a buffer, resulting in a system oops or memory corruption. CVE-2008-4934 Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that results in a kernel oops due to an unchecked return value. CVE-2008-5025 Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfs filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a filesystem with a corrupted catalog name length, resulting in a system oops or memory corruption. CVE-2008-5029 Andrea Bittau reported a DoS issue in the unix socket subsystem that allows a local user to cause memory corruption, resulting in a kernel panic. CVE-2008-5079 Hugo Dias reported a DoS condition in the ATM subsystem that can be triggered by a local user by calling the svc_listen function twice on the same socket and reading /proc/net/atm/*vc. CVE-2008-5182 Al Viro reported race conditions in the inotify subsystem that may allow local users to acquire elevated privileges. CVE-2008-5300 Dann Frazier reported a DoS condition that allows local users to cause the out of memory handler to kill off privileged processes or trigger soft lockups due to a starvation issue in the unix socket subsystem. For the stable distribution (etch), this problem has been fixed in version 2.6.18.dfsg.1-23etch1. We recommend that you upgrade your linux-2.6, fai-kernels, and user-mode-linux packages. Note: Debian 'etch' includes linux kernel packages based upon both the 2.6.18 and 2.6.24 linux releases. All known security issues are carefully tracked against both packages and both packages will receive security updates until security support for Debian 'etch' concludes. However, given the high frequency at which low-severity security issues are discovered in the kernel and the resource requirements of doing an update, lower severity 2.6.18 and 2.6.24 updates will typically release in a staggered or "leap-frog" fashion.
Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a denial of service or privilege escalation. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:
Tavis Ormandy reported a local DoS and potential privilege escalation in the Virtual Dynamic Shared Objects (vDSO) implementation.
Eugene Teo reported a local DoS issue in the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that causes the kernel to output error messages in an infinite loop.
Milos Szeredi reported that the usage of splice() on files opened with O_APPEND allows users to write to the file at arbitrary offsets, enabling a bypass of possible assumed semantics of the O_APPEND flag.
Vlad Yasevich reported an issue in the SCTP subsystem that may allow remote users to cause a local DoS by triggering a kernel oops.
Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that causes the kernel to overrun a buffer, resulting in a system oops or memory corruption.
Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that results in a kernel oops due to an unchecked return value.
Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfs filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a filesystem with a corrupted catalog name length, resulting in a system oops or memory corruption.
Andrea Bittau reported a DoS issue in the unix socket subsystem that allows a local user to cause memory corruption, resulting in a kernel panic.
Hugo Dias reported a DoS condition in the ATM subsystem that can be triggered by a local user by calling the svc_listen function twice on the same socket and reading /proc/net/atm/*vc.
Al Viro reported race conditions in the inotify subsystem that may allow local users to acquire elevated privileges.
Dann Frazier reported a DoS condition that allows local users to cause the out of memory handler to kill off privileged processes or trigger soft lockups due to a starvation issue in the unix socket subsystem.
For the stable distribution (etch), this problem has been fixed in version 2.6.18.dfsg.1-23etch4.
We recommend that you upgrade your linux-2.6, fai-kernels, and user-mode-linux packages.
Note: Debian 'etch' includes linux kernel packages based upon both the 2.6.18 and 2.6.24 linux releases. All known security issues are carefully tracked against both packages and both packages will receive security updates until security support for Debian 'etch' concludes. However, given the high frequency at which low-severity security issues are discovered in the kernel and the resource requirements of doing an update, lower severity 2.6.18 and 2.6.24 updates will typically release in a staggered or "leap-frog" fashion.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.
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