USN-57-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

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.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 4.10

• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-amd64-k8 -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-amd64-generic -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-386 -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-powerpc -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-power4 -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-amd64-xeon -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-k7 -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-k7-smp -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-amd64-k8-smp -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-686-smp -
• linux-patch-debian-2.6.8.1 -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-power4-smp -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-power3-smp -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-powerpc-smp -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-power3 -
• linux-image-2.6.8.1-4-686 -

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2004-1235
• CVE-2004-1337