DSA-1800

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a denial of service, privilege escalation or a sensitive memory leak. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:

CVE-2009-0028

Chris Evans discovered a situation in which a child process can send an arbitrary signal to its parent.

CVE-2009-0834

Roland McGrath discovered an issue on amd64 kernels that allows local users to circumvent system call audit configurations which filter based on the syscall numbers or argument details.

CVE-2009-0835

Roland McGrath discovered an issue on amd64 kernels with CONFIG_SECCOMP enabled. By making a specially crafted syscall, local users can bypass access restrictions.

CVE-2009-0859

Jiri Olsa discovered that a local user can cause a denial of service (system hang) using a SHM_INFO shmctl call on kernels compiled with CONFIG_SHMEM disabled. This issue does not affect prebuilt Debian kernels.

CVE-2009-1046

Mikulas Patocka reported an issue in the console subsystem that allows a local user to cause memory corruption by selecting a small number of 3-byte UTF-8 characters.

CVE-2009-1072

Igor Zhbanov reported that nfsd was not properly dropping CAP_MKNOD, allowing users to create device nodes on file systems exported with root_squash.

CVE-2009-1184

Dan Carpenter reported a coding issue in the selinux subsystem that allows local users to bypass certain networking checks when running with compat_net=1. CVE-2009-1192

Shaohua Li reported an issue in the AGP subsystem they may allow local users to read sensitive kernel memory due to a leak of uninitialized memory.

CVE-2009-1242

Benjamin Gilbert reported a local denial of service vulnerability in the KVM VMX implementation that allows local users to trigger an oops.

CVE-2009-1265

Thomas Pollet reported an overflow in the af_rose implementation that allows remote attackers to retrieve uninitialized kernel memory that may contain sensitive data.

CVE-2009-1337

Oleg Nesterov discovered an issue in the exit_notify function that allows local users to send an arbitrary signal to a process by running a program that modifies the exit_signal field and then uses an exec system call to launch a setuid application.

CVE-2009-1338

Daniel Hokka Zakrisson discovered that a kill(-1) is permitted to reach processes outside of the current process namespace. CVE-2009-1439

Pavan Naregundi reported an issue in the CIFS filesystem code that allows remote users to overwrite memory via a long nativeFileSystem field in a Tree Connect response during mount.

For the stable distribution (lenny), these problems have been fixed in version 2.6.26-15lenny2.

For the oldstable distribution (etch), these problems, where applicable, will be fixed in future updates to linux-2.6 and linux-2.6.24.

We recommend that you upgrade your linux-2.6 and user-mode-linux packages.

Note: Debian carefully tracks all known security issues across every linux kernel package in all releases under active security support. However, given the high frequency at which low-severity security issues are discovered in the kernel and the resource requirements of doing an update, updates for lower priority issues will normally not be released for all kernels at the same time. Rather, they will be released in a staggered or "leap-frog" fashion.