USN-2872-2: Linux kernel (Wily HWE) vulnerability

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2872-2

19th January, 2016

linux-lts-wily vulnerability

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

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Summary

The system could be made to crash or run programs as an administrator.

Software description

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

Details

Yevgeny Pats discovered that the session keyring implementation in the
Linux kernel did not properly reference count when joining an existing
session keyring. A local attacker could use this to cause a denial of
service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code with
administrative privileges.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package version:

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:

linux-image-4.2.0-25-powerpc64-emb 4.2.0-25.30~14.04.1

linux-image-4.2.0-25-powerpc-smp 4.2.0-25.30~14.04.1

linux-image-4.2.0-25-lowlatency 4.2.0-25.30~14.04.1

linux-image-4.2.0-25-powerpc-e500mc 4.2.0-25.30~14.04.1

linux-image-4.2.0-25-generic-lpae 4.2.0-25.30~14.04.1

linux-image-4.2.0-25-powerpc64-smp 4.2.0-25.30~14.04.1

linux-image-4.2.0-25-generic 4.2.0-25.30~14.04.1

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-2016-0728