Paul Starzetz discovered a race condition in the ELF library and a.out binary format loaders, which can be locally exploited in several different ways to gain root privileges. (CAN-2004-1235)
Liang Bin found a design flaw in the capability module. After this module was loaded on demand in a running system, all unprivileged user space processes got all kernel capabilities (thus essentially root privileges). This is mitigated by the fact that the capability module is loaded very early in the boot process of a standard Ubuntu system, when no unprivileged user processes are yet running. (CAN-2004-1337)
9 January 2005
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Paul Starzetz discovered a race condition in the ELF library and a.out binary format loaders, which can be locally exploited in several different ways to gain root privileges. (CAN-2004-1235)
Liang Bin found a design flaw in the capability module. After this module was loaded on demand in a running system, all unprivileged user space processes got all kernel capabilities (thus essentially root privileges). This is mitigated by the fact that the capability module is loaded very early in the boot process of a standard Ubuntu system, when no unprivileged user processes are yet running. (CAN-2004-1337)
Finally, this update fixes a memory leak in the ip_conntrack_ftp iptables module. However, it is believed that this is not exploitable.
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.
Vulmon