(RHSA-2010:0895) Moderate: systemtap security update

SystemTap is an instrumentation system for systems running the Linux
kernel, version 2.6. Developers can write scripts to collect data on the
operation of the system. staprun, the SystemTap runtime tool, is used for
managing SystemTap kernel modules (for example, loading them).

It was discovered that staprun did not properly sanitize the environment
before executing the modprobe command to load an additional kernel module.
A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to escalate their
privileges. (CVE-2010-4170)

Note: On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, an attacker must be a member of the
stapusr group to exploit this issue. Also note that, after installing this
update, users already in the stapdev group must be added to the stapusr
group in order to be able to run the staprun tool.

Red Hat would like to thank Tavis Ormandy for reporting this issue.

SystemTap users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain
a backported patch to correct this issue.