Security 10748 Published by

Thanks Greg for this one:

Package : kernel-image-2.4.18-1-alpha, kernel-image-2.4.18-1-i386, kernel-source-2.4.18
Vulnerability : userland can access full kernel memory
Problem type : local
Debian-specific: no
CVE Id(s) : CAN-2003-0961

Recently multiple servers of the Debian project were compromised using a Debian developers account and an unknown root exploit. Forensics revealed a burneye encrypted exploit. Robert van der Meulen managed to decrypt the binary which revealed a kernel exploit. Study of the exploit by the RedHat and SuSE kernel and security teams quickly revealed that the exploit used an integer overflow in the brk system call. Using this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into giving access to the full kernel address space. This problem was found in September by Andrew Morton, but unfortunately that was too late for the 2.4.22 kernel release.

This bug has been fixed in kernel version 2.4.23 for the 2.4 tree and 2.6.0-test6 kernel tree. For Debian it has been fixed in version 2.4.18-12 of the kernel source packages, version 2.4.18-14 of the i386 kernel images and version 2.4.18-11 of the alpha kernel images.

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