El mar, 26-11-2002 a las 06:23, Roman Drahtmueller escribió:
Hi there!
I just came across this article: http://www.securiteam.com/exploits/6E00F2060U.html Summary: A vulnerability in the Linux kernel allows local attackers to cause it to halt. The flaw seems to be related to the kernel's handling of the nested task (NT) flag inside an lcall7. What says SuSE about this topic? Do you advise a kernel update? Which SuSE-versions are affected? We're busy with the updates right now as I write. Kernel updates are non-trivial, so they take some time.
What that particular bug is concerned: Give me a shell, and I'll have your machine die in two minutes via resource starvation or bad tricks to some other direction. A bug that freezes your machine may be ugly, and a DoS is security-critical, yes. But there is no better security tool than userdel if you have users on your system that mess with the stability of it. If that bug could be triggered remotely, you could bet that we'd be loud about it.
I'm not exactly a kernel programming, but if the vulerability exist and is easy to exploit and most systems are unpatched (after all, you need access to exploit it) then the next worm like Migthy, that install a source, compile it and run with user wwwrun, named, nobody, in a chroot jail or whatever could exploit it and be really harmful. And upgrading a kernel is something that must be handled with more care than upgrading servers or libs... so is better to fix the kernel when is not urged by a remote exploit.