USN-2285-1: Linux kernel (Quantal HWE) vulnerabilities

17 July 2014

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.

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Releases

Packages

Details

Sasha Levin reported a flaw in the Linux kernel's point-to-point protocol
(PPP) when used with the Layer Two Tunneling Protocol (L2TP). A local user
could exploit this flaw to gain administrative privileges. (CVE-2014-4943)

Michael S. Tsirkin discovered an information leak in the Linux kernel's
segmentation of skbs when using the zerocopy feature of vhost-net. A local
attacker could exploit this flaw to gain potentially sensitive information
from kernel memory. (CVE-2014-0131)

Salva Peiró discovered an information leak in the Linux kernel's media-
device driver. A local attacker could exploit this flaw to obtain sensitive
information from kernel memory. (CVE-2014-1739)

An flaw was discovered in the Linux kernel's audit subsystem when auditing
certain syscalls. A local attacker could exploit this flaw to obtain
potentially sensitive single-bit values from kernel memory or cause a
denial of service (OOPS). (CVE-2014-3917)

A flaw was discovered in the Linux kernel's implementation of user
namespaces with respect to inode permissions. A local user could exploit
this flaw by creating a user namespace to gain administrative privileges.
(CVE-2014-4014)

An information leak was discovered in the rd_mcp backend of the iSCSI
target subsystem in the Linux kernel. A local user could exploit this flaw
to obtain sensitive information from ramdisk_mcp memory by leveraging
access to a SCSI initiator. (CVE-2014-4027)

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 12.04

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.