RHSA-2009:0009: Important: kernel security and bug fix update

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linuxoperating system.These updated packages address the following security issues: Tavis Ormandy discovered a deficiency in the Linux kernel 32-bit and 64-bit emulation. This could allow a local, unprivileged user to prepareand run a specially-crafted binary which would use this deficiency to leakuninitialized and potentially sensitive data. (CVE-2008-0598, Important) Olaf Kirch reported a flaw in the i915 kernel driver that only affects the Intel G33 series and newer. This flaw could, potentially, lead to localprivilege escalation. (CVE-2008-3831, Important) Miklos Szeredi reported a missing check for files opened with OAPPEND in syssplice(). This could allow a local, unprivileged user to bypass theappend-only file restrictions. (CVE-2008-4554, Important) a deficiency was found in the Linux kernel Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) implementation. This could lead to a possible denial ofservice if one end of a SCTP connection did not support the AUTH extension.(CVE-2008-4576, Important) Wei Yongjun reported a flaw in the Linux kernel SCTP implementation. In certain code paths, sctpsfviolationparamlen() could be called with awrong parameter data type. This could lead to a possible denial of service.(CVE-2008-4618, Important) when fput() was called to close a socket, the scmdestroy() function in the Linux kernel could make indirect recursive calls to itself. This could,potentially, lead to a denial of service issue. (CVE-2008-5029, Important) the ext2 and ext3 filesystem code failed to properly handle corrupted data structures, leading to a possible local denial of service issue whenread or write operations were performed. (CVE-2008-3528, Low)These updated packages also address numerous bugs, including the following: several System on Chip (SoC) audio drivers allocated memory in the platform device probe function but did not free this memory in the event ofan error. Instead, the memory was freed in the device probe function'serror path. This could result in a 'double free' error. With this update,errors cause memory to be freed correctly. when a check was made to see if the netlink attribute fitted into available memory, the value returned, "remaining", could become negativedue to alignment in nlanext(). GCC set "remaining" to unsigned whentesting against the sizeof(nla), however. As a consequence, the test wouldalways succeed and the function nlaforeachattr() could, potentially,access memory outside the received buffer. With this update, sizeof is castto an integer, ensuring sizeof(nla) does a signed test and prevents anillegal memory de-reference. if a user-space process used a SIGIO notification and did not disable it before closing the file descriptor, a stale pointer was left in theasyncqueue of the real-time clock. When a different user-space processsubsequently used a SIGIO notification, the kernel de-referenced thispointer and crashed. With this updated kernel, SIGIO notifications aredisabled when the file descriptor is closed, preventing this. the real-time kernel included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux MRG did not randomize exec, heap or libc addresses. This update corrects this omission:exec, heap and libc addresses are now randomized.Numerous other bug fixes included with this update are noted in the Red HatEnterprise MRG 1.0 Real Time Security Update Release Note, available at thelocation noted in the References section below.All Red Hat Enterprise MRG users should install this update which addressesthese vulnerabilities and fixes these bugs.