7.1 - DSA-1237

Several local and remote vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a denial of service or the execution of arbitrary code. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:

CVE-2005-4093

Olof Johansson reported a local DoS (Denial of Service) vulnerability on the PPC970 platform. Unpriveleged users can hang the system by executing the "attn" instruction, which was not being disabled at boot.

CVE-2006-4538

Kirill Korotaev reported a local DoS (Denial of Service) vulnerability on the ia64 and sparc architectures. A user could cause the system to crash by executing a malformed ELF binary due to insufficient verification of the memory layout.

CVE-2006-4997

ADLab Venustech Info Ltd reported a potential remote DoS (Denial of Service) vulnerability in the IP over ATM subsystem. A remote system could cause the system to crash by sending specially crafted packets that would trigger an attempt to free an already-freed pointer resulting in a system crash.

CVE-2006-5174

Martin Schwidefsky reported a potential leak of sensitive information on s390 systems. The copy_from_user function did not clear the remaining bytes of the kernel buffer after receiving a fault on the userspace address, resulting in a leak of uninitialized kernel memory. A local user could exploit this by appending to a file from a bad address.

CVE-2006-5649

Fabio Massimo Di Nitto reported a potential remote DoS (Denial of Service) vulnerability on powerpc systems. The alignment exception only checked the exception table for -EFAULT, not for other errors. This can be exploited by a local user to cause a system crash (panic).

CVE-2006-5871

Bill Allombert reported that various mount options are ignored by smbfs when UNIX extensions are enabled. This includes the uid, gid and mode options. Client systems would silently use the server-provided settings instead of honoring these options, changing the security model. This update includes a fix from Haroldo Gamal that forces the kernel to honor these mount options. Note that, since the current versions of smbmount always pass values for these options to the kernel, it is not currently possible to activate unix extensions by omitting mount options. However, this behavior is currently consistent with the current behavior of the next Debian release, 'etch'.

The following matrix explains which kernel version for which architecture fix the problems mentioned above:

Debian 3.1 (sarge) Source 2.4.27-10sarge5 Alpha architecture 2.4.27-10sarge5 ARM architecture 2.4.27-2sarge5 Intel IA-32 architecture 2.4.27-10sarge5 Intel IA-64 architecture 2.4.27-10sarge5 Motorola 680x0 architecture 2.4.27-3sarge5 Big endian MIPS 2.4.27-10.sarge4.040815-2 Little endian MIPS 2.4.27-10.sarge4.040815-2 PowerPC architecture 2.4.27-10sarge5 IBM S/390 architecture 2.4.27-2sarge5 Sun Sparc architecture 2.4.27-9sarge5

The following matrix lists additional packages that were rebuilt for compatibility with or to take advantage of this update:

Debian 3.1 (sarge) fai-kernels 1.9.1sarge5 kernel-image-2.4.27-speakup 2.4.27-1.1sarge4 mindi-kernel 2.4.27-2sarge4 systemimager 3.2.3-6sarge4

We recommend that you upgrade your kernel package immediately and reboot the machine. If you have built a custom kernel from the kernel source package, you will need to rebuild to take advantage of these fixes.