USN-4876-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

16 March 2021

Several security issues were fixed in the Linux kernel.

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Details

Olivier Benjamin and Pawel Wieczorkiewicz discovered a race condition the
Xen paravirt block backend in the Linux kernel, leading to a use-after-free
vulnerability. An attacker in a guest VM could use this to cause a denial
of service in the host OS. (CVE-2020-29569)

It was discovered that the Marvell WiFi-Ex device driver in the Linux
kernel did not properly validate ad-hoc SSIDs. A local attacker could use
this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute
arbitrary code. (CVE-2020-36158)

吴异 discovered that the NFS implementation in the Linux kernel did not
properly prevent access outside of an NFS export that is a subdirectory of
a file system. An attacker could possibly use this to bypass NFS access
restrictions. (CVE-2021-3178)

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 16.04
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.
Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages
(e.g. linux-generic, linux-generic-lts-RELEASE, linux-virtual,
linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically perform
this as well.

References

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