Debian DSA-1237-1 : kernel-source-2.4.27 - several vulnerabilities

high Nessus Plugin ID 23911

Synopsis

The remote Debian host is missing a security-related update.

Description

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. Unprivileged 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'.

Solution

Upgrade the 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.

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

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 23911

File Name: debian_DSA-1237.nasl

Version: 1.17

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Debian Local Security Checks

Published: 12/18/2006

Updated: 1/4/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.1

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:kernel-source-2.4.27, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:3.1

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/Debian/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Patch Publication Date: 12/17/2006

Vulnerability Publication Date: 12/7/2005

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2006-4093, CVE-2006-4538, CVE-2006-4997, CVE-2006-5174, CVE-2006-5871

DSA: 1237

Detections

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