A system hardening measure could be bypassed.
Federico Manuel Bento discovered that the Linux kernel did not properly apply Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) in some situations for setuid a.out binaries. A local attacker could use this to improve the chances of exploiting an existing vulnerability in a setuid a.out binary.
4 June 2019
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
A system hardening measure could be bypassed.
Federico Manuel Bento discovered that the Linux kernel did not properly apply Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) in some situations for setuid a.out binaries. A local attacker could use this to improve the chances of exploiting an existing vulnerability in a setuid a.out binary.
As a hardening measure, this update disables a.out support.
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.