6.9 - RHSA-2012:1540

Problem Description:

Updated kernel packages that fix multiple security issues, two bugs, and add two enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) - i386, ia64, noarch, ppc, s390x, x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client) - i386, noarch, x86_64

3. Description:

These packages contain the Linux kernel.

Security fixes:

* A race condition in the way asynchronous I/O and fallocate() interacted when using ext4 could allow a local, unprivileged user to obtain random data from a deleted file. (CVE-2012-4508, Important)

* A flaw in the way the Xen hypervisor implementation range checked guest provided addresses in the XENMEM_exchange hypercall could allow a malicious, para-virtualized guest administrator to crash the hypervisor or, potentially, escalate their privileges, allowing them to execute arbitrary code at the hypervisor level. (CVE-2012-5513, Important)

* A flaw in the Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) protocol implementation could allow a local, unprivileged user to cause a denial of service. (CVE-2012-2372, Moderate)

* A race condition in the way access to inet->opt ip_options was synchronized in the Linux kernel's TCP/IP protocol suite implementation. Depending on the network facing applications running on the system, a remote attacker could possibly trigger this flaw to cause a denial of service. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to cause a denial of service regardless of the applications the system runs. (CVE-2012-3552, Moderate)

* The Xen hypervisor implementation did not properly restrict the period values used to initialize per VCPU periodic timers. A privileged guest user could cause an infinite loop on the physical CPU. If the watchdog were enabled, it would detect said loop and panic the host system. (CVE-2012-4535, Moderate)

* A flaw in the way the Xen hypervisor implementation handled set_p2m_entry() error conditions could allow a privileged, fully-virtualized guest user to crash the hypervisor. (CVE-2012-4537, Moderate)

Red Hat would like to thank Theodore Ts'o for reporting CVE-2012-4508; the Xen project for reporting CVE-2012-5513, CVE-2012-4535, and CVE-2012-4537; and Hafid Lin for reporting CVE-2012-3552. Upstream acknowledges Dmitry Monakhov as the original reporter of CVE-2012-4508. CVE-2012-2372 was discovered by Li Honggang of Red Hat.

Bug fixes:

* Previously, the interrupt handlers of the qla2xxx driver could clear pending interrupts right after the IRQ lines were attached during system start-up. Consequently, the kernel could miss the interrupt that reported completion of the link initialization, and the qla2xxx driver then failed to detect all attached LUNs. With this update, the qla2xxx driver has been modified to no longer clear interrupt bits after attaching the IRQ lines. The driver now correctly detects all attached LUNs as expected. (BZ#870118)

* The Ethernet channel bonding driver reported the MII (Media Independent Interface) status of the bond interface in 802.3ad mode as being up even though the MII status of all of the slave devices was down. This could pose a problem if the MII status of the bond interface was used to determine if failover should occur. With this update, the agg_device_up() function has been added to the bonding driver, which allows the driver to report the link status of the bond interface correctly, that is, down when all of its slaves are down, in the 802.3ad mode. (BZ#877943)

Enhancements:

* This update backports several changes from the latest upstream version of the bnx2x driver. The most important change, the remote-fault link detection feature, allows the driver to periodically scan the physical link layer for remote faults. If the physical link appears to be up and a fault is detected, the driver indicates that the link is down. When the fault is cleared, the driver indicates that the link is up again. (BZ#870120)

* The INET socket interface has been modified to send a warning message when the ip_options structure is allocated directly by a third-party module using the kmalloc() function. (BZ#874973)

Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues and add these enhancements. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

4. Solution:

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

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

To install kernel packages manually, use "rpm -ivh [package]". Do not use "rpm -Uvh" as that will remove the running kernel binaries from your system. You may use "rpm -e" to remove old kernels after determining that the new kernel functions properly on your system.

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

822754 - CVE-2012-2372 kernel: rds-ping cause kernel panic 853465 - CVE-2012-3552 kernel: net: slab corruption due to improper synchronization around inet->opt 869904 - CVE-2012-4508 kernel: ext4: AIO vs fallocate stale data exposure 870086 - CVE-2012-4535 kernel: xen: VCPU timer overflow leads to PCPU deadlock and host death-by-watchdog 870101 - CVE-2012-4537 kernel: xen: Memory mapping failure can crash Xen 874973 - net: WARN if struct ip_options was allocated directly by kmalloc [rhel-5.8.z] 877391 - CVE-2012-5513 kernel: xen: XENMEM_exchange may overwrite hypervisor memory