USN-2853-1: Linux kernel (Wily HWE) vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2853-1

20th December, 2015

linux-lts-wily vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its
derivatives:

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Summary

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.

Software description

• linux-lts-wily
  - Linux hardware enablement kernel from Wily
  
  

Details

Felix Wilhelm discovered a race condition in the Xen paravirtualized
drivers which can cause double fetch vulnerabilities. An attacker in the
paravirtualized guest could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service
(crash the host) or potentially execute arbitrary code on the host.
()

Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk discovered the Xen PCI backend driver does not
perform sanity checks on the device's state. An attacker could exploit this
flaw to cause a denial of service by flooding the logging system with
WARN() messages causing the initial domain to exhaust disk space.
(













.

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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