USN-2466-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

13 January 2015

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.

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.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Releases

Packages

Details

A null pointer dereference flaw was discovered in the the Linux kernel's
SCTP implementation when ASCONF is used. A remote attacker could exploit
this flaw to cause a denial of service (system crash) via a malformed INIT
chunk. (CVE-2014-7841)

A race condition with MMIO and PIO transactions in the KVM (Kernel Virtual
Machine) subsystem of the Linux kernel was discovered. A guest OS user
could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (guest OS crash) via a
specially crafted application. (CVE-2014-7842)

Miloš Prchlík reported a flaw in how the ARM64 platform handles a single
byte overflow in __clear_user. A local user could exploit this flaw to
cause a denial of service (system crash) by reading one byte beyond a
/dev/zero page boundary. (CVE-2014-7843)

A stack buffer overflow was discovered in the ioctl command handling for
the Technotrend/Hauppauge USB DEC devices driver. A local user could
exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly
gain privileges. (CVE-2014-8884)

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.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 14.04

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.

References

Related notices

Join the discussion

Need help with your security needs?

Ubuntu Pro provides up to ten-year security coverage for over 23,000 open-source packages within the Ubuntu Main and Universe repositories.

Talk to an expert to find out what would work best for you

Further reading