USN-2226-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

27 May 2014

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.

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Packages

Details

Matthew Daley reported an information leak in the floppy disk driver of the
Linux kernel. An unprivileged local user could exploit this flaw to obtain
potentially sensitive information from kernel memory. (CVE-2014-1738)

Matthew Daley reported a flaw in the handling of ioctl commands by the
floppy disk driver in the Linux kernel. An unprivileged local user could
exploit this flaw to gain administrative privileges if the floppy disk
module is loaded. (CVE-2014-1737)

A flaw was discovered in the handling of network packets when mergeable
buffers are disabled for virtual machines in the Linux kernel. Guest OS
users may exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (host OS crash) or
possibly gain privilege on the host OS. (CVE-2014-0077)

Török Edwin discovered a flaw with Xen netback driver when used with
Linux configurations that do not allow sleeping in softirq context. A guest
administrator could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (system
crash) on the host. (CVE-2014-2580)

A flaw was discovered in the Linux kernel's ping sockets. An unprivileged
local user could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (system
crash) or possibly gain privileges via a crafted application.
(CVE-2014-2851)

Hannes Frederic Sowa reported a hash collision ordering problem in the xfs
filesystem in the Linux kernel. A local user could exploit this flaw to
cause filesystem corruption and a denial of service (oops or panic).
(CVE-2014-7283)

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Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 14.04

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

ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change the kernel updates have
been given a new version number, which requires you to recompile and
reinstall all third party kernel modules you might have installed. If
you use linux-restricted-modules, you have to update that package as
well to get modules which work with the new kernel version. Unless you
manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages (e.g. linux-generic,
linux-server, linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically
perform this as well.

References

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