USN-2468-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

13 January 2015

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.

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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)

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Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 14.10

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.

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