Description of problem: The handling functions for sending and receiving messages, in rdspagecopyuser(), use the unchecked copyuserinatomic functions without any access checks on user-provided pointers. As a result, by passing a kernel address as an iovec base address in recvmsg-style calls, a local user can overwrite arbitrary kernel memory, which can easily be used to escalate privileges to root.
Introduced via 7875e18e (v2.6.30-rc1).
Acknowledgements:
Red Hat would like to thank Dan Rosenberg of Virtual Security Research for reporting this issue.
A flaw was found in the way pi to pi futex requeueing was handled.
A local unprivileged user can use this flaw to increase their privileges on the system.