linux vulnerability

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-3339  

The system could be made to run programs as an administrator.

A race condition between chown() and execve() was discovered in the Linux kernel. A local attacker could exploit this race by using chown on a setuid-user-binary to gain administrative privileges.

5 May 2015

linux vulnerability

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

  • Ubuntu 15.04

Summary

The system could be made to run programs as an administrator.

Software Description

  • linux - Linux kernel

Details

A race condition between chown() and execve() was discovered in the Linux kernel. A local attacker could exploit this race by using chown on a setuid-user-binary to gain administrative privileges.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 15.04
linux-image-3.19.0-16-generic - 3.19.0-16.16
linux-image-3.19.0-16-generic-lpae - 3.19.0-16.16
linux-image-3.19.0-16-lowlatency - 3.19.0-16.16
linux-image-3.19.0-16-powerpc-e500mc - 3.19.0-16.16
linux-image-3.19.0-16-powerpc-smp - 3.19.0-16.16
linux-image-3.19.0-16-powerpc64-emb - 3.19.0-16.16
linux-image-3.19.0-16-powerpc64-smp - 3.19.0-16.16

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