Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 6.06
• Ubuntu 5.10
• Ubuntu 5.04

Details

A race condition was discovered in the do_add_counters() functions.
Processes which do not run with full root privileges, but have the
CAP_NET_ADMIN capability can exploit this to crash the machine or read
a random piece of kernel memory. In Ubuntu there are no packages that
are affected by this, so this can only be an issue for you if you use
third-party software that uses Linux capabilities. (CVE-2006-0039)

John Stultz discovered a faulty BUG_ON trigger in the handling of
POSIX timers. A local attacker could exploit this to trigger a kernel
oops and crash the machine. (CVE-2006-2445)

Dave Jones discovered that the PowerPC kernel did not perform certain
required access_ok() checks. A local user could exploit this to read
arbitrary kernel memory and crash the kernel on 64-bit systems, and
possibly read arbitrary kernel memory on 32-bit systems.
(CVE-2006-2448)

A design flaw was discovered in the prctl(PR_SET_DUMPABLE, …) system
call, which allowed a local user to have core dumps created in a
directory he could not normally write to. This could be exploited to
drain available disk space on system partitions, or, under some
circumstances, to execute arbitrary code with full root privileges.
This flaw only affects Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. (CVE-2006-2451)

In addition, the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS update fixes a range of bugs.