USN-2841-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2841-1

17th December, 2015

linux 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
  - Linux kernel
  
  

Details

Jan Beulich discovered that the KVM svm hypervisor implementation in the
Linux kernel did not properly catch Debug exceptions on AMD processors. An
attacker in a guest virtual machine could use this to cause a denial of
service (system crash) in the host OS. ()

It was discovered that the driver for Digi Neo and ClassicBoard devices did
not properly initialize data structures. A local attacker could use this to
obtain sensitive information from the kernel. (















.

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. If
you use linux-restricted-modules, you have to update that package as
well to get modules which work with the new kernel version. Unless you
manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages (e.g. linux-generic,
linux-server, linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically
perform this as well.

References

,

CVE-2015-8104