Secunia

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

1) Missing checks on the SCTP chunk length within the "xt_sctp" code may result in an infinite loop that exhausts system resources via a zero chunk length.

The vulnerability is related to #1 in:
SA19926

2) A race condition in run_posix_cpu_timers can be exploited by local users to cause a DoS (BUG_ON crash) by causing one CPU to attach a timer to a process that is exiting.

The vulnerability has been reported in versions prior to 2.6.16.21.

3) Missing access_ok checks on the arguments passed to the sys_debug_setcontext system call in signal_32.c and signal_64.c can potentially be exploited to read kernel memory or cause the system to crash on the PowerPC platform.

The vulnerability has been reported in versions prior to 2.6.16.21.

4) An error in the "ftdi_sio" driver can be exploited by malicious, local users to exhaust available memory by writing more data to the serial port than the driver is able to handle.

The vulnerability has been reported in versions prior to 2.6.17.

Solution
Update to version 2.6.17.1.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Reported by vendor.
2) John Stultz
3) Dave Jones

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115015841413687
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=194215

Kernel.org:
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.17.1
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.16.21

Other references
Further details available in Customer Area

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area