Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2849-1
19th December, 2015
linux-lts-utopic 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-utopic
- Linux hardware enablement kernel from Utopic
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.
(CVE-2015-8550)
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 (NULL dereference) on the host.
(CVE-2015-8551)
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.
(CVE-2015-8552)
Jann Horn discovered a ptrace issue with user namespaces in the Linux
kernel. The namespace owner could potentially exploit this flaw by ptracing
a root owned process entering the user namespace to elevate its privileges
and potentially gain access outside of the namespace.
(http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1527374)
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following
package version:
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:
linux-image-3.16.0-57-generic-lpae
3.16.0-57.77~14.04.1
linux-image-3.16.0-57-lowlatency
3.16.0-57.77~14.04.1
linux-image-3.16.0-57-powerpc-e500mc
3.16.0-57.77~14.04.1
linux-image-3.16.0-57-powerpc64-emb
3.16.0-57.77~14.04.1
linux-image-3.16.0-57-powerpc64-smp
3.16.0-57.77~14.04.1
linux-image-3.16.0-57-generic
3.16.0-57.77~14.04.1
linux-image-3.16.0-57-powerpc-smp
3.16.0-57.77~14.04.1
To update your system, please follow these instructions:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
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
CVE-2015-8550,
CVE-2015-8551,
CVE-2015-8552,
CVE-2015-NNN2