Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a denial of service or privilege escalation. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:
Eugene Teo reported a local DoS issue in the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that causes the kernel to output error messages in an infinite loop.
Milos Szeredi reported that the usage of splice() on files opened with O_APPEND allows users to write to the file at arbitrary offsets, enabling a bypass of possible assumed semantics of the O_APPEND flag.
Vlad Yasevich reported an issue in the SCTP subsystem that may allow remote users to cause a local DoS by triggering a kernel oops.
Wei Yongjun reported an issue in the SCTP subsystem that may allow remote users to cause a local DoS by triggering a kernel panic.
Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that causes the kernel to overrun a buffer, resulting in a system oops or memory corruption.
Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted filesystem that results in a kernel oops due to an unchecked return value.
Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfs filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a filesystem with a corrupted catalog name length, resulting in a system oops or memory corruption.
Andrea Bittau reported a DoS issue in the unix socket subsystem that allows a local user to cause memory corruption, resulting in a kernel panic.
Johannes Berg reported a remote DoS issue in the libertas wireless driver, which can be triggered by a specially crafted beacon/probe response.
Al Viro reported race conditions in the inotify subsystem that may allow local users to acquire elevated privileges.
Dann Frazier reported a DoS condition that allows local users to cause the out of memory handler to kill off privileged processes or trigger soft lockups due to a starvation issue in the unix socket subsystem.
For the stable distribution (etch), these problems have been fixed in version 2.6.24-6~etchnhalf.7.
We recommend that you upgrade your linux-2.6.24 packages.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.