Security

From the Red Hat advisory:

It was discovered that acpid could create its log file ("/var/log/acpid") with random permissions on some systems. A local attacker could use this flaw to escalate their privileges if the log file was created as world-writable and with the setuid or setgid bit set. (CVE-2009-4033)

From the Fedora advisory:

A buffer over-read flaw was found in the way Expat handles malformed UTF-8 sequences when processing XML files. A specially-crafted XML file could cause applications using Expat to crash while parsing the file. (CVE-2009-3560)

From the Red Hat advisory:

Multiple security flaws were found in the way Flash Player displayed certain SWF content. An attacker could use these flaws to create a specially-crafted SWF file that would cause flash-plugin to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code when the victim loaded a page containing the specially-crafted SWF content. (CVE-2009-3794, CVE-2009-3796, CVE-2009-3798, CVE-2009-3799, CVE-2009-3800)

Sylvain Beucler discovered that gforge, a collaborative development tool, is prone to a symlink attack, which allows local users to perform a denial of service attack by overwriting arbitrary files.

From the Ubuntu advisory:

It was discovered that GRUB 2 did not properly validate passwords. An attacker with physical access could conduct a brute force attack and bypass authentication by submitting a 1 character password.

From the Ubuntu advisory:

Dave Jones discovered that the gdth SCSI driver did not correctly validate array indexes in certain ioctl calls. A local attacker could exploit this to crash the system or gain elevated privileges. (CVE-2009-3080)

J. Bruce Fields discovered that NFSv4 did not correctly use the credential cache. A local attacker using a mount with AUTH_NULL authentication could exploit this to crash the system or gain root privileges. Only Ubuntu 9.10 was affected. (CVE-2009-3623)

Alexander Zangerl discovered that the kernel keyring did not correctly reference count. A local attacker could issue a series of specially crafted keyring calls to crash the system or gain root privileges. Only Ubuntu 9.10 was affected. (CVE-2009-3624)

Avi Kivity discovered that KVM did not correctly check privileges when accessing debug registers. A local attacker could exploit this to crash a host system from within a guest system, leading to a denial of service. Ubuntu 6.06 and 9.10 were not affected. (CVE-2009-3722)

Philip Reisner discovered that the connector layer for uvesafb, pohmelfs, dst, and dm did not correctly check capabilties. A local attacker could exploit this to crash the system or gain elevated privileges. Ubuntu 6.06 was not affected. (CVE-2009-3725)

Robin Getz discovered that NOMMU systems did not correctly validate NULL pointers in do_mmap_pgoff calls. A local attacker could attempt to allocate large amounts of memory to crash the system, leading to a denial of service. Only Ubuntu 6.06 and 9.10 were affected. (CVE-2009-3888)

Roel Kluin discovered that the Hisax ISDN driver did not correctly check the size of packets. A remote attacker could send specially crafted packets to cause a system crash, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2009-4005)

Lennert Buytenhek discovered that certain 802.11 states were not handled correctly. A physically-proximate remote attacker could send specially crafted wireless traffic that would crash the system, leading to a denial of service. Only Ubuntu 9.10 was affected. (CVE-2009-4026, CVE-2009-4027)

Permission issues were found in the megaraid_sas driver (for SAS based RAID controllers) in the Linux kernel. The "dbg_lvl" and "poll_mode_io" files on the sysfs file system ("/sys/") had world-writable permissions. This could allow local, unprivileged users to change the behavior of the driver. (CVE-2009-3889, CVE-2009-3939, Moderate)

From the Red Hat bugzilla entry:

Between 2.6.28.10 and 2.6.29, net/ipv4/ip_fragment.c was patched, changing from dev_net(dev) to container_of(...). Unfortunately the goto section (out_fail) on oversized packets inside ip_frag_reasm() didn't get touched up as well. Oversized IP packets cause a NULL pointer dereference and immediate hang.

From the Red Hat advisory:

On x86 platforms, the do_insn_fetch() function did not limit the amount of instruction bytes fetched per instruction. Users in guest operating systems could leverage this flaw to cause large latencies on SMP hosts that could lead to a local denial of service on the host operating system. This update fixes this issue by imposing the architecturally-defined 15 byte length limit for instructions. (CVE-2009-4031)

From the CVE entry:

src/http/ngx_http_parse.c in nginx (aka Engine X) 0.1.0 through 0.4.14, 0.5.x before 0.5.38, 0.6.x before 0.6.39, 0.7.x before 0.7.62, and 0.8.x before 0.8.14 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and worker process crash) via a long URI.

From the Red Hat advisory:

Robin Park and Dmitri Vinokurov discovered a flaw in the way ntpd handled certain malformed NTP packets. ntpd logged information about all such packets and replied with an NTP packet that was treated as malformed when received by another ntpd. A remote attacker could use this flaw to create an NTP packet reply loop between two ntpd servers via a malformed packet with a spoofed source IP address and port, causing ntpd on those servers to use excessive amounts of CPU time and fill disk space with log messages. (CVE-2009-3563)

From the Mandriva advisory:

The verify_hostname_of_cert function in the certificate checking feature in IO-Socket-SSL (IO::Socket::SSL) 1.14 through 1.25 only matches the prefix of a hostname when no wildcard is used, which allows remote attackers to bypass the hostname check for a certificate (CVE-2009-3024).

From the Mandriva advisory:

Unspecified vulnerability in Pidgin 2.6.0 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a link in a Yahoo IM (CVE-2009-3025)

The msn_slp_process_msg function in libpurple/protocols/msn/slpcall.c in the MSN protocol plugin in libpurple 2.6.0 and 2.6.1, as used in Pidgin before 2.6.2, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via a handwritten (aka Ink) message, related to an uninitialized variable and the incorrect UTF16-LE charset name (CVE-2009-3084).

Mikal Gule discovered that request-tracker, an extensible trouble-ticket tracking system, is prone to an attack, where an attacker with access to the same domain can hijack a user's RT session.

A stack-based buffer overflow was found in the zsh command interpreter. An attacker could use this flaw to cause a denial of service (zsh crash), when providing a specially-crafted string as input to the zsh shell.