USN-3816-1: systemd vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 18.10
• Ubuntu 18.04 ESM
• Ubuntu 16.04 ESM

Packages

• systemd - system and service manager

Details

Jann Horn discovered that unit_deserialize incorrectly handled status messages
above a certain length. A local attacker could potentially exploit this via
NotifyAccess to inject arbitrary state across re-execution and obtain root
privileges. (CVE-2018-15686)

Jann Horn discovered a race condition in chown_one(). A local attacker
could potentially exploit this by setting arbitrary permissions on certain
files to obtain root privileges. This issue only affected Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
and Ubuntu 18.10. (CVE-2018-15687)

It was discovered that systemd-tmpfiles mishandled symlinks in
non-terminal path components. A local attacker could potentially exploit
this by gaining ownership of certain files to obtain root privileges. This
issue only affected Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. (CVE-2018-6954)

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 18.10

• systemd - 239-7ubuntu10.3

Ubuntu 18.04

• systemd - 237-3ubuntu10.6

Ubuntu 16.04

• systemd - 229-4ubuntu21.8

After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make
all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2018-15686
• CVE-2018-15687
• CVE-2018-6954

Related notices

• USN-3816-2: systemd-coredump, libnss-systemd, libsystemd-dev, libudev-dev, libudev1, libnss-mymachines, systemd-sysv, libudev1-udeb, systemd, udev, systemd-journal-remote, systemd-container, libnss-myhostname, libpam-systemd, libsystemd0, udev-udeb, systemd-tests, libnss-resolve