Kitz Forum
Computer Software => Security => Topic started by: AdrianH on January 24, 2012, 12:29:26 PM
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http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Linux-root-exploit-due-to-memory-access-Update-2-1419834.html
Linux is in trouble this week :(
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Not for months on end until an update is available.
Nice to know about these things though. I'm off to check my kernel release now.
Just update this morning.
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I should be OK. I have 2.6.38.8
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Thanks for the information Adrian. It should be noted that this exploit is only available to someone who is already logged onto the system as a user, so it doesn't represent a threat of intrusion from outside (unless the security of the system has already been breached in some other way).
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Any flaw is unacceptable, but to my untrained eye, this one doesn't look very serious.
As Eric points out, the hacker must already have shell access on the machine.
If I'm reading things correctly [1]., this is how it works...
As with every exploit, the hacker wants to escalate his privileges to those of the 'root' (administrator) user.
To do that, he needs access to the 'su' (superuser) program, or to another executable with its setuid bit set to root.
He runs that program, and using his 'sploit, he modifies the process memory and spawns his own process to gain a root shell. That's quite a lot of requirements.
I just noticed that Ubuntu 11.10 has automatically installed a new kernel. Was that to rollout the patch for this?
The machine was running this:
Linux core2quad 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:56:25 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Now it's running this..
Linux core2quad 3.0.0-15-generic #26-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 20 17:23:00 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[1] http://blog.zx2c4.com/749