Ilja van Sprundel has reported a vulnerability in the Linux kernel, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or potentially gain escalated privileges.

The vulnerability is caused due to a race condition in the compatibility code for "execve()" on the IA64 and AMD64 platforms that occurs when counting and copying arguments from user-space to kernel-space.

Successful exploitation crashes the kernel and may allow execution of arbitrary code with escalated privileges.

The vulnerability has been reported in versions 2.4.31 and prior, and in versions 2.6.6 and prior.

Solution
The vulnerability has been fixed in versions 2.4.32-pre1 and 2.6.7.

Provided and/or discovered by
Ilja van Sprundel, Suresec.

Original Advisory
Kernel.org:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/testing/patch-2.4.32.log

Suresec:
http://www.suresec.org/advisories/adv4.pdf

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