The system could be made to crash or run programs as an administrator.
Yevgeny Pats discovered that the session keyring implementation in the Linux kernel did not properly reference count when joining an existing session keyring. A local attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code with administrative privileges.
19 January 2016
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
The system could be made to crash or run programs as an administrator.
Yevgeny Pats discovered that the session keyring implementation in the Linux kernel did not properly reference count when joining an existing session keyring. A local attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code with administrative privileges.
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. Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages (e.g. linux-generic, linux-generic-lts-RELEASE, linux-virtual, linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically perform this as well.
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