Some vulnerabilities have been reported in the Linux kernel, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to cause a DoS (Denial of Service), disclose potentially sensitive information, and bypass certain security restrictions, or by malicious people to cause a DoS.

1) The "setsockopt()" function is not restricted to privileged users with the "CAP_NET_ADMIN" capability. This can be exploited to bypass IPsec policies or set invalid policies to exploit other vulnerabilities or exhaust available kernel memory.

2) An error in the "syscall32_setup_pages()" function on 64-bit x86 platforms can be exploited to cause a memory leak by executing a malicious 32-bit application with specially crafted ELF headers.

3) An error in seq_file implementation in the SCSI procfs interface (sg.c), can be exploited to cause a memory leak by repeatedly reading from the /proc/scsi/sg/devices file.

4) An error in validating the first argument of the "sys_set_mempolicy()" function in "mm/mempolicy.c" may be exploited to cause a DoS via a negative argument value.

5) An error in declaring the "portptr" variable that points to the port number in the conntrack tuple as static in "ip_nat_proto_tcp.c" and "ip_nat_proto_udp.c" may be exploited by malicious people to cause memory corruption by causing two packets belonging to the same protocol to be NATed at the same time.

6) A race condition in connection timer handling on SMP multiprocessor systems can be exploited to crash the kernel by setting up an expiration handler to modify the "ip_vs_conn_tab" connection list while the list still being traversed.

7) The "sys_get_thread_area()" function does not properly clear its returned structure. This can potentially expose a small amount of kernel memory to userspace programs.

8) The "icmp_push_reply function()" function does not properly free memory when the "ip_append_data()" function fails. This can be exploited by malicious people to exhaust memory via a large number of specially crafted packets that cause the function to fail.

9) A memory leak in the "ip6_input_finish()" function in "/net/ipv6/ip6_input.c" may be exploit to cause a DoS via certain malformed IPv6 packets that prevents the SKB from being freed.

10) An error during error recovery in the "__block_prepare_write()" function in fs/buffer.c may disclose contents of previously deleted files.

The vulnerabilities have been reported in the 2.6 kernel. Vulnerability #6 also affects the 2.4 kernel.

Solution
Update to version 2.6.13.
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Herbert Xu
2) Suresh Siddha
3) Jan Blunck
6) Neil Horman
7) Paolo Giarrusso
8) Ollie Wild
10) Dmitriy Monakhov

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Kernel.org:
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.13
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/gregkh/linux-2.6.13.y.git;a=commit;h=d04b4f8c1c9766e49fad6a141fc61cb30db69a5c
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/gregkh/linux-2.6.13.y.git;a=commit;h=fb3d89498d268c8dedc1ab5b15fa64f536564577
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=71ae18ec690953e9ba7107c7cc44589c2cc0d9f1
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/gregkh/linux-2.6.13.y.git;a=commit;h=cb94c62c252796f42bb83fe40960d12f3ea5a82a
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/gregkh/linux-2.6.13.y.git;a=commit;h=bfd272b1ca1164382eabaa9986aad822adb91eb2
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ChangeLog-2.4.32
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/marcelo/linux-2.4.git;a=commit;h=e684f066dff5628bb61ad1912de6e8058b5b4c7d

Red Hat Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=174345
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=174344

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers