Canonical Outs New Kernel Live Patch for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Fix Security Flaws

Last week, when Canonical published new kernel updates for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux releases, they also pushed a new kernel live patch to users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system using the Canonical Livepatch Service.

Only two security flaws are patched, the first being a user-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2017-7374) discovered in Linux kernel's filesystem encryption subsystem, which could have allowed a local attacker to crash the affected, unpatched machine by causing a denial of service (DoS attack).

The second security flaw (CVE-2016-7097) was discovered by Jan Kara and Andreas Gruenbacher in Linux kernel's filesystem implementation, which failed to clear the setgid bit during a setxattr call, thus allowing a local attacker to elevate group privileges.