Issued:

2015-03-03

Updated:

2015-03-03

RHSA-2015:0285 - Important: kernel security and bug fix update

Synopsis

Important: kernel security and bug fix update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory Important

Topic

Updated kernel packages that fix one security issue and three bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 Extended Update Support.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

Description

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.

• A flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel's SCTP implementation validated INIT chunks when performing Address Configuration Change (ASCONF). A remote attacker could use this flaw to crash the system by sending a specially crafted SCTP packet to trigger a NULL pointer dereference on the system. (CVE-2014-7841, Important)

This issue was discovered by Liu Wei of Red Hat.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Due to several bugs in the network console logging, a race condition between the network console send operation and the driver's IRQ handler could occur, or the network console could access invalid memory content. As a consequence, the respective driver, such as vmxnet3, triggered a BUG_ON() assertion and the system terminated unexpectedly. A patch addressing these bugs has been applied so that driver's IRQs are disabled before processing the send operation and the network console now accesses the RCU-protected (read-copy update) data properly. Systems using the network console logging no longer crashes due to the aforementioned conditions. (BZ#1165983)

• A bug in the vmxnet3 driver allowed potential race conditions to be triggered when the driver was used with the netconsole module. The race conditions allowed the driver's internal New API (NAPI) poll routine to run concurrently with the netpoll controller routine, which resulted in data corruption and a subsequent kernel panic. To fix this problem, the vmxnet3 driver has been modified to call the appropriate interrupt handler to schedule NAPI poll requests properly. (BZ#1179594)

• Prior to this update, nfs_mark_return_delegation() was called without any locking, resulting in unsafe dereferencing of delegation->inode. Because the inode is only used to discover the nfs_client, the callers now pass a valid pointer to the nfs_server as a parameter. (BZ#1187637)

All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• kernel-headers-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-common-x86_64-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• python-perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• python-perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• python-perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-debug-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-common-i686-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-common-ppc64-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-kdump-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• python-perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-bootwrapper-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• python-perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-debug-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-debug-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-debug-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-headers-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-headers-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• kernel-doc-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.noarch.rpm
• perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-headers-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-debug-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
• kernel-debug-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• python-perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-kdump-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-debuginfo-common-s390x-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-kdump-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-firmware-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.noarch.rpm
• kernel-debug-devel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• python-perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.i686.rpm
• perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• python-perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.src.rpm
• perf-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.ppc64.rpm
• kernel-debug-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm
• kernel-2.6.32-358.56.1.el6.s390x.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 1163087

CVEs

• CVE-2014-7841

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.