7.8 - RHSA-2009:0009

Problem Description:

Updated kernel packages that fix several security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.0.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

MRG Realtime for RHEL 5 Server - i386, noarch, x86_64

3. Description:

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

These updated packages address the following security issues:

* Tavis Ormandy discovered a deficiency in the Linux kernel 32-bit and 64-bit emulation. This could allow a local, unprivileged user to prepare and run a specially-crafted binary which would use this deficiency to leak uninitialized and potentially sensitive data. (CVE-2008-0598, Important)

* Olaf Kirch reported a flaw in the i915 kernel driver that only affects the Intel G33 series and newer. This flaw could, potentially, lead to local privilege escalation. (CVE-2008-3831, Important)

* Miklos Szeredi reported a missing check for files opened with O_APPEND in sys_splice(). This could allow a local, unprivileged user to bypass the append-only file restrictions. (CVE-2008-4554, Important)

* a deficiency was found in the Linux kernel Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) implementation. This could lead to a possible denial of service if one end of a SCTP connection did not support the AUTH extension. (CVE-2008-4576, Important)

* Wei Yongjun reported a flaw in the Linux kernel SCTP implementation. In certain code paths, sctp_sf_violation_paramlen() could be called with a wrong parameter data type. This could lead to a possible denial of service. (CVE-2008-4618, Important)

* when fput() was called to close a socket, the __scm_destroy() function in the Linux kernel could make indirect recursive calls to itself. This could, potentially, lead to a denial of service issue. (CVE-2008-5029, Important)

* the ext2 and ext3 filesystem code failed to properly handle corrupted data structures, leading to a possible local denial of service issue when read or write operations were performed. (CVE-2008-3528, Low)

These updated packages also address numerous bugs, including the following:

* several System on Chip (SoC) audio drivers allocated memory in the platform device probe function but did not free this memory in the event of an error. Instead, the memory was freed in the device probe function's error path. This could result in a 'double free' error. With this update, errors cause memory to be freed correctly.

* when a check was made to see if the netlink attribute fitted into available memory, the value returned, "remaining", could become negative due to alignment in nla_next(). GCC set "remaining" to unsigned when testing against the sizeof(*nla), however. As a consequence, the test would always succeed and the function nla_for_each_attr() could, potentially, access memory outside the received buffer. With this update, sizeof is cast to an integer, ensuring sizeof(*nla) does a signed test and prevents an illegal memory de-reference.

* if a user-space process used a SIGIO notification and did not disable it before closing the file descriptor, a stale pointer was left in the async_queue of the real-time clock. When a different user-space process subsequently used a SIGIO notification, the kernel de-referenced this pointer and crashed. With this updated kernel, SIGIO notifications are disabled when the file descriptor is closed, preventing this.

* the real-time kernel included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux MRG did not randomize exec, heap or libc addresses. This update corrects this omission: exec, heap and libc addresses are now randomized.

Numerous other bug fixes included with this update are noted in the Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.0 Real Time Security Update Release Note, available at the location noted in the References section below.

All Red Hat Enterprise MRG users should install this update which addresses these vulnerabilities and fixes these bugs.

4. Solution:

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

5. Bugs fixed (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/):

433938 - CVE-2008-0598 kernel: linux x86_64 ia32 emulation leaks uninitialized data 455095 - event trace syscall on i386 has bogus parameters 459577 - CVE-2008-3528 Linux kernel ext[234] directory corruption denial of service 460102 - kernel: alsa: asoc: fix double free and memory leak in many codec drivers [mrg-1] 461330 - Update realtime kernel's lpfc version to 8.2.0.29 462281 - kernel: netlink: fix overrun in attribute iteration 464502 - CVE-2008-3831 kernel: i915 kernel drm driver arbitrary ioremap 465730 - CVE-2008-4618 kernel: sctp: Fix kernel panic while process protocol violation parameter 465744 - kernel: rtc: fix kernel panic on second use of SIGIO notification 465862 - Warning from rt_mutex code while testing infiniband 466079 - CVE-2008-4576 kernel: sctp: Fix oops when INIT-ACK indicates that peer doesn't support AUTH 466153 - [Broadcom 5.3 feat] Update bnx2 to version 1.7.4+ 466341 - RT kernel fails to boot on Intel Canelands processors (16 and 24 cores) 466554 - Update qla2xxx driver with RHEL5.3 + upstream fixes 466557 - Update the e1000e driver with RHEL5.3 and upstream fixes 466558 - Update the tg3 driver with RHEL5.3 and upstream fixes 466707 - CVE-2008-4554 kernel: don't allow splice() to files opened with O_APPEND 467739 - Add amd64_edac driver from IBM 467781 - MRG kernel has the e1000e bug 467783 - SAN Patchset needs merging into MRG 468205 - Turn off building of ocfs2 filesystem module in MRG RT kernel 469186 - [FOCUS] Lockdep fixes cause latency regression 470201 - CVE-2008-5029 kernel: Unix sockets kernel panic