The linux update issued as DLA-1731-1 caused a regression in the vmxnet3 (VMware virtual network adapter) driver. This update corrects that regression, and an earlier regression in the CIFS network filesystem implementation introduced in DLA-1422-1. For reference the original advisory text follows.

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service or information leaks.

CVE-2016-10741

A race condition was discovered in XFS that would result in a crash (BUG). A local user permitted to write to an XFS volume could use this for denial of service.

CVE-2017-5753

Further instances of code that was vulnerable to Spectre variant 1 (bounds-check bypass) have been mitigated.

CVE-2017-13305

A memory over-read was discovered in the keys subsystem's encrypted key type. A local user could use this for denial of service or possibly to read sensitive information.

CVE-2018-3639 (SSB)

Multiple researchers have discovered that Speculative Store Bypass (SSB), a feature implemented in many processors, could be used to read sensitive information from another context. In particular, code in a software sandbox may be able to read sensitive information from outside the sandbox. This issue is also known as Spectre variant 4.

This update fixes bugs in the mitigations for SSB for AMD processors.

CVE-2018-5848

The wil6210 wifi driver did not properly validate lengths in scan and connection requests, leading to a possible buffer overflow. On systems using this driver, a local user with the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability could use this for denial of service (memory corruption or crash) or potentially for privilege escalation.

CVE-2018-5953

The swiotlb subsystem printed kernel memory addresses to the system log, which could help a local attacker to exploit other vulnerabilities.

CVE-2018-12896, CVE-2018-13053

Team OWL337 reported possible integer overflows in the POSIX timer implementation. These might have some security impact.

CVE-2018-16862

Vasily Averin and Pavel Tikhomirov from Virtuozzo Kernel Team discovered that the cleancache memory management feature did not invalidate cached data for deleted files. On Xen guests using the tmem driver, local users could potentially read data from other users' deleted files if they were able to create new files on the same volume.

CVE-2018-16884

A flaw was found in the NFS 4.1 client implementation. Mounting NFS shares in multiple network namespaces at the same time could lead to a user-after-free. Local users might be able to use this for denial of service (memory corruption or crash) or possibly for privilege escalation.

This can be mitigated by disabling unprivileged users from creating user namespaces, which is the default in Debian.

CVE-2018-17972

Jann Horn reported that the /proc/*/stack files in procfs leaked sensitive data from the kernel. These files are now only readable by users with the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability (usually only root)

CVE-2018-18281

Jann Horn reported a race condition in the virtual memory manager that can result in a process briefly having access to memory after it is freed and reallocated. A local user permitted to create containers could possibly exploit this for denial of service (memory corruption) or for privilege escalation.

CVE-2018-18690

Kanda Motohiro reported that XFS did not correctly handle some xattr (extended attribute) writes that require changing the disk format of the xattr. A user with access to an XFS volume could use this for denial of service.

CVE-2018-18710

It was discovered that the cdrom driver does not correctly validate the parameter to the CDROM_SELECT_DISC ioctl. A user with access to a cdrom device could use this to read sensitive information from the kernel or to cause a denial of service (crash).

CVE-2018-19824

Hui Peng and Mathias Payer discovered a use-after-free bug in the USB audio driver. A physically present attacker able to attach a specially designed USB device could use this for privilege escalation.

CVE-2018-19985

Hui Peng and Mathias Payer discovered a missing bounds check in the hso USB serial driver. A physically present user able to attach a specially designed USB device could use this to read sensitive information from the kernel or to cause a denial of service (crash).

CVE-2018-20169

Hui Peng and Mathias Payer discovered missing bounds checks in the USB core. A physically present attacker able to attach a specially designed USB device could use this to cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly for privilege escalation.

CVE-2018-20511

InfoSect reported an information leak in the AppleTalk IP/DDP implemntation. A local user with CAP_NET_ADMIN capability could use this to read sensitive information from the kernel.

CVE-2019-3701

Muyu Yu and Marcus Meissner reported that the CAN gateway implementation allowed the frame length to be modified, typically resulting in out-of-bounds memory-mapped I/O writes. On a system with CAN devices present, a local user with CAP_NET_ADMIN capability in the initial net namespace could use this to cause a crash (oops) or other hardware-dependent impact.

CVE-2019-3819

A potential infinite loop was discovered in the HID debugfs interface exposed under /sys/kernel/debug/hid. A user with access to these files could use this for denial of service.

This interface is only accessible to root by default, which fully mitigates the issue.

CVE-2019-6974

Jann Horn reported a use-after-free bug in KVM. A local user with access to /dev/kvm could use this to cause a denial of service (memory corruption or crash) or possibly for privilege escalation.

CVE-2019-7221

Jim Mattson and Felix Wilhelm reported a user-after-free bug in KVM's nested VMX implementation. On systems with Intel CPUs, a local user with access to /dev/kvm could use this to cause a denial of service (memory corruption or crash) or possibly for privilege escalation.

Nested VMX is disabled by default, which fully mitigates the issue.

CVE-2019-7222

Felix Wilhelm reported an information leak in KVM for x86. A local user with access to /dev/kvm could use this to read sensitive information from the kernel.

CVE-2019-9213

Jann Horn reported that privileged tasks could cause stack segments, including those in other processes, to grow downward to address 0. On systems lacking SMAP (x86) or PAN (ARM), this exacerbated other vulnerabilities: a NULL pointer dereference could be exploited for privilege escalation rather than only for denial of service.

For Debian 8 'Jessie', these problems have been fixed in version 3.16.64-1.

We recommend that you upgrade your linux packages.

NOTE: Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the DLA security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP1 LTSS kernel was updated to receive various security and bugfixes.

Four new speculative execution information leak issues have been identified in Intel CPUs. (bsc#1111331)

CVE-2018-12126: Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling (MSBDS)

CVE-2018-12127: Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling (MFBDS)

CVE-2018-12130: Microarchitectural Load Port Data Samling (MLPDS)

CVE-2019-11091: Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM)

This kernel update contains software mitigations for these issues, which also utilize CPU microcode updates shipped in parallel.

For more information on this set of information leaks, check out https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=7023736

The following security bugs were fixed: CVE-2016-10741:
fs/xfs/xfs_aops.c allowed local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) because there is a race condition between direct and memory-mapped I/O (associated with a hole) that is handled with BUG_ON instead of an I/O failure (bnc#1114920 bnc#1124010).

CVE-2017-1000407: By flooding the diagnostic port 0x80 an exception can be triggered leading to a kernel panic (bnc#1071021).

CVE-2017-16533: The usbhid_parse function in drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c allowed local users to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read and system crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted USB device (bnc#1066674).

CVE-2017-7273: The cp_report_fixup function in drivers/hid/hid-cypress.c allowed physically proximate attackers to cause a denial of service (integer underflow) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted HID report (bnc#1031240).

CVE-2017-7472: The KEYS subsystem allowed local users to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via a series of KEY_REQKEY_DEFL_THREAD_KEYRING keyctl_set_reqkey_keyring calls (bnc#1034862).

CVE-2018-14633: A security flaw was found in the chap_server_compute_md5() function in the ISCSI target code in the Linux kernel in a way an authentication request from an ISCSI initiator is processed. An unauthenticated remote attacker can cause a stack buffer overflow and smash up to 17 bytes of the stack. The attack requires the iSCSI target to be enabled on the victim host.
Depending on how the target's code was built (i.e. depending on a compiler, compile flags and hardware architecture) an attack may lead to a system crash and thus to a denial-of-service or possibly to a non-authorized access to data exported by an iSCSI target.
(bnc#1107829).

CVE-2018-15572: The spectre_v2_select_mitigation function in arch/x86/kernel/cpu/bugs.c did not always fill RSB upon a context switch, which made it easier for attackers to conduct userspace-userspace spectreRSB attacks (bnc#1102517 bnc#1105296).

CVE-2018-16884: NFS41+ shares mounted in different network namespaces at the same time can make bc_svc_process() use wrong back-channel IDs and cause a use-after-free vulnerability. Thus a malicious container user can cause a host kernel memory corruption and a system panic. Due to the nature of the flaw, privilege escalation cannot be fully ruled out (bnc#1119946).

CVE-2018-18281: The mremap() syscall performed TLB flushes after dropping pagetable locks. If a syscall such as ftruncate() removes entries from the pagetables of a task that is in the middle of mremap(), a stale TLB entry can remain for a short time that permits access to a physical page after it has been released back to the page allocator and reused. (bnc#1113769).

CVE-2018-18386: drivers/tty/n_tty.c allowed local attackers (who are able to access pseudo terminals) to hang/block further usage of any pseudo terminal devices due to an EXTPROC versus ICANON confusion in TIOCINQ (bnc#1094825).

CVE-2018-18690: A local attacker able to set attributes on an xfs filesystem could make this filesystem non-operational until the next mount by triggering an unchecked error condition during an xfs attribute change, because xfs_attr_shortform_addname in fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_attr.c mishandled ATTR_REPLACE operations with conversion of an attr from short to long form (bnc#1105025).

CVE-2018-18710: An information leak in cdrom_ioctl_select_disc in drivers/cdrom/cdrom.c could be used by local attackers to read kernel memory because a cast from unsigned long to int interferes with bounds checking. This is similar to CVE-2018-10940 and CVE-2018-16658 (bnc#1113751).

CVE-2018-19407: The vcpu_scan_ioapic function in arch/x86/kvm/x86.c allowed local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and BUG) via crafted system calls that reach a situation where ioapic is uninitialized (bnc#1116841).

CVE-2018-19824: A local user could exploit a use-after-free in the ALSA driver by supplying a malicious USB Sound device (with zero interfaces) that is mishandled in usb_audio_probe in sound/usb/card.c (bnc#1118152).

CVE-2018-19985: The function hso_get_config_data in drivers/net/usb/hso.c read if_num from the USB device (as a u8) and uses it to index a small array, resulting in an object out-of-bounds (OOB) read that potentially allowed arbitrary read in the kernel address space (bnc#1120743).

CVE-2018-20169: The USB subsystem mishandled size checks during the reading of an extra descriptor, related to __usb_get_extra_descriptor in drivers/usb/core/usb.c (bnc#1119714).

CVE-2018-5391: The Linux kernel was vulnerable to a denial of service attack with low rates of specially modified packets targeting IP fragment re-assembly. An attacker may cause a denial of service condition by sending specially crafted IP fragments. Various vulnerabilities in IP fragmentation have been discovered and fixed over the years. The current vulnerability (CVE-2018-5391) became exploitable in the Linux kernel with the increase of the IP fragment reassembly queue size (bnc#1103097).

CVE-2018-9516: In hid_debug_events_read of drivers/hid/hid-debug.c, there is a possible out of bounds write due to a missing bounds check.
This could lead to local escalation of privilege with System execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation.
(bnc#1108498).

CVE-2018-9568: In sk_clone_lock of sock.c, there is a possible memory corruption due to type confusion. This could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation. (bnc#1118319).

CVE-2019-11486: The Siemens R3964 line discipline driver in drivers/tty/n_r3964.c had multiple race conditions (bnc#1133188). The line discipline was disabled.

CVE-2019-3459: A heap address information leak while using L2CAP_GET_CONF_OPT was discovered (bnc#1120758).

CVE-2019-3460: A heap data infoleak in multiple locations including L2CAP_PARSE_CONF_RSP was found (bnc#1120758).

CVE-2019-3882: A flaw was found vfio interface implementation that permitted violation of the user's locked memory limit. If a device is bound to a vfio driver, such as vfio-pci, and the local attacker is administratively granted ownership of the device, it may cause a system memory exhaustion and thus a denial of service (DoS).
(bnc#1131416 bnc#1131427).

CVE-2019-6974: kvm_ioctl_create_device in virt/kvm/kvm_main.c mishandled reference counting because of a race condition, leading to a use-after-free (bnc#1124728).

CVE-2019-7221: The KVM implementation had a Use-after-Free (bnc#1124732).

CVE-2019-7222: The KVM implementation had an Information Leak (bnc#1124735).

CVE-2019-9213: expand_downwards in mm/mmap.c lacked a check for the mmap minimum address, which made it easier for attackers to exploit kernel NULL pointer dereferences on non-SMAP platforms. This is related to a capability check for the wrong task (bnc#1128166).

CVE-2019-9503: Multiple brcmfmac frame validation bypasses have been fixed (bnc#1132828).

The update package also includes non-security fixes. See advisory for details.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the SUSE security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - Since Linux kernel version 3.2, the mremap() syscall performs TLB flushes after dropping pagetable locks.
    If a syscall such as ftruncate() removes entries from the pagetables of a task that is in the middle of     mremap(), a stale TLB entry can remain for a short time that permits access to a physical page after it     has been released back to the page allocator and reused. This is fixed in the following kernel versions:
    4.9.135, 4.14.78, 4.18.16, 4.19. (CVE-2018-18281)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

The Unity Linux 20 host has a package installed that is affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the UTSA-2026-003041 advisory.

    Since Linux kernel version 3.2, the mremap() syscall performs TLB flushes after dropping pagetable locks.
    If a syscall such as ftruncate() removes entries from the pagetables of a task that is in the middle of     mremap(), a stale TLB entry can remain for a short time that permits access to a physical page after it     has been released back to the page allocator and reused. This is fixed in the following kernel versions:
    4.9.135, 4.14.78, 4.18.16, 4.19.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Unity Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP4 kernel was updated to 3.0.101-108.81 to receive various security and bugfixes.

The following security bugs were fixed :

CVE-2018-18281: An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel, the mremap() syscall performs TLB flushes after dropping pagetable locks.
If a syscall such as ftruncate() removes entries from the pagetables of a task that is in the middle of mremap(), a stale TLB entry can remain for a short time that permits access to a physical page after it has been released back to the page allocator and reused (bnc#1113769).

CVE-2018-18710: An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel, an information leak in cdrom_ioctl_select_disc in drivers/cdrom/cdrom.c could be used by local attackers to read kernel memory because a cast from unsigned long to int interferes with bounds checking. This is similar to CVE-2018-10940 and CVE-2018-16658 (bnc#1113751).

CVE-2018-18386: drivers/tty/n_tty.c in the Linux kernel allowed local attackers (who are able to access pseudo terminals) to hang/block further usage of any pseudo terminal devices due to an EXTPROC versus ICANON confusion in TIOCINQ (bnc#1094825).

CVE-2017-7273: The cp_report_fixup function in drivers/hid/hid-cypress.c in the Linux kernel 4.x allowed physically proximate attackers to cause a denial of service (integer underflow) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted HID report (bnc#1031240).

CVE-2017-16533: The usbhid_parse function in drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c in the Linux kernel allowed local users to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read and system crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted USB device (bnc#1066674).

CVE-2017-1000407: An denial of service issue was discovered in the Linux kernel, by flooding the diagnostic port 0x80 an exception can be triggered leading to a kernel panic (bnc#1071021).

CVE-2018-9516: An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel, the copy_to_user() inside the HID code does not correctly check the length before executing (bsc#1108498).

CVE-2018-14633: A security flaw was found in the chap_server_compute_md5() function in the ISCSI target code in the Linux kernel in a way an authentication request from an ISCSI initiator is processed. An unauthenticated remote attacker can cause a stack buffer overflow and smash up to 17 bytes of the stack. The attack requires the iSCSI target to be enabled on the victim host.
Depending on how the target's code was built (i.e. depending on a compiler, compile flags and hardware architecture) an attack may lead to a system crash and thus to a denial-of-service or possibly to a non-authorized access to data exported by an iSCSI target. Due to the nature of the flaw, privilege escalation cannot be fully ruled out, although we believe it is highly unlikely (bnc#1107829).

The update package also includes non-security fixes. See advisory for details.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the SUSE security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP4 kernel for Azure was updated to receive various security and bugfixes.

The following security bugs were fixed :

CVE-2018-19407: The vcpu_scan_ioapic function in arch/x86/kvm/x86.c allowed local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and BUG) via crafted system calls that reach a situation where ioapic was uninitialized (bnc#1116841).

CVE-2018-16884: NFS41+ shares mounted in different network namespaces at the same time can make bc_svc_process() use wrong back-channel IDs and cause a use-after-free vulnerability. Thus a malicious container user can cause a host kernel memory corruption and a system panic. Due to the nature of the flaw, privilege escalation cannot be fully ruled out (bnc#1119946).

CVE-2018-20169: The USB subsystem mishandled size checks during the reading of an extra descriptor, related to __usb_get_extra_descriptor in drivers/usb/core/usb.c (bnc#1119714).

CVE-2018-9568: In sk_clone_lock of sock.c, there is a possible memory corruption due to type confusion. This could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation (bnc#1118319).

CVE-2018-16862: A security flaw was found in the way that the cleancache subsystem clears an inode after the final file truncation (removal). The new file created with the same inode may contain leftover pages from cleancache and the old file data instead of the new one (bnc#1117186).

CVE-2018-14625: A flaw was found where an attacker may be able to have an uncontrolled read to kernel-memory from within a vm guest. A race condition between connect() and close() function may allow an attacker using the AF_VSOCK protocol to gather a 4 byte information leak or possibly intercept or corrupt AF_VSOCK messages destined to other clients (bnc#1106615).

CVE-2018-19985: The function hso_probe read if_num from the USB device (as an u8) and used it without a length check to index an array, resulting in an OOB memory read in hso_probe or hso_get_config_data that could be used by local attackers (bnc#1120743).

CVE-2018-12232: In net/socket.c there is a race condition between fchownat and close in cases where they target the same socket file descriptor, related to the sock_close and sockfs_setattr functions.
fchownat did not increment the file descriptor reference count, which allowed close to set the socket to NULL during fchownat's execution, leading to a NULL pointer dereference and system crash (bnc#1097593).

CVE-2018-18397: The userfaultfd implementation mishandled access control for certain UFFDIO_ ioctl calls, as demonstrated by allowing local users to write data into holes in a tmpfs file (if the user has read-only access to that file, and that file contains holes), related to fs/userfaultfd.c and mm/userfaultfd.c (bnc#1117656).

CVE-2018-19854: An issue was discovered in the crypto_report_one() and related functions in crypto/crypto_user.c (the crypto user configuration API) do not fully initialize structures that are copied to userspace, potentially leaking sensitive memory to user programs.
NOTE: this is a CVE-2013-2547 regression but with easier exploitability because the attacker did not need a capability (however, the system must have the CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER kconfig option) (bnc#1118428).

CVE-2018-19824: A local user could exploit a use-after-free in the ALSA driver by supplying a malicious USB Sound device (with zero interfaces) that is mishandled in usb_audio_probe in sound/usb/card.c (bnc#1118152).

CVE-2018-18281: The mremap() syscall performs TLB flushes after dropping pagetable locks. If a syscall such as ftruncate() removes entries from the pagetables of a task that is in the middle of mremap(), a stale TLB entry can remain for a short time that permits access to a physical page after it has been released back to the page allocator and reused. (bnc#1113769).

CVE-2017-5753: Systems with microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and branch prediction may allow unauthorized disclosure of information to an attacker with local user access via a side-channel analysis (bnc#1074578)

The update package also includes non-security fixes. See advisory for details.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the SUSE security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Published	Updated	Severity
123420	Debian DLA-1731-2 : linux regression update (Spectre)	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	3/28/2019	1/9/2026	high
125283	SUSE SLES12 Security Update : kernel (SUSE-SU-2019:1289-1) (MDSUM/RIDL) (MFBDS/RIDL/ZombieLoad) (MLPDS/RIDL) (MSBDS/Fallout)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	5/20/2019	12/5/2022	high
248527	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2018-18281	Nessus	Misc.	8/12/2025	7/17/2026	high
286856	Unity Linux 20.1060a / 20.1070a Security Update: kernel (UTSA-2026-003041)	Nessus	Unity Linux Local Security Checks	1/15/2026	1/16/2026	high
118952	SUSE SLES11 Security Update : kernel (SUSE-SU-2018:3746-1)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	11/14/2018	7/22/2024	high
119077	openSUSE Security Update : the Linux Kernel (openSUSE-2018-1427)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	11/21/2018	7/19/2024	high
121569	SUSE SLES12 Security Update : kernel (SUSE-SU-2019:0222-1) (Spectre)	Nessus	SuSE Local Security Checks	2/4/2019	5/24/2022	high

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