(RHSA-2015:1272) Moderate: kernel security, bug fix, and enhancement update

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux
operating system.

• A flaw was found in the way Linux kernel’s Transparent Huge Pages (THP)
  implementation handled non-huge page migration. A local, unprivileged user
  could use this flaw to crash the kernel by migrating transparent hugepages.
  (CVE-2014-3940, Moderate)

• A buffer overflow flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel’s eCryptfs
  implementation decoded encrypted file names. A local, unprivileged user
  could use this flaw to crash the system or, potentially, escalate their
  privileges on the system. (CVE-2014-9683, Moderate)

• A race condition flaw was found between the chown and execve system
  calls. When changing the owner of a setuid user binary to root, the race
  condition could momentarily make the binary setuid root. A local,
  unprivileged user could potentially use this flaw to escalate their
  privileges on the system. (CVE-2015-3339, Moderate)

• Multiple out-of-bounds write flaws were found in the way the Cherry
  Cymotion keyboard driver, KYE/Genius device drivers, Logitech device
  drivers, Monterey Genius KB29E keyboard driver, Petalynx Maxter remote
  control driver, and Sunplus wireless desktop driver handled HID reports
  with an invalid report descriptor size. An attacker with physical access to
  the system could use either of these flaws to write data past an allocated
  memory buffer. (CVE-2014-3184, Low)

• An information leak flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel’s Advanced
  Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) implementation handled access of the user
  control’s state. A local, privileged user could use this flaw to leak
  kernel memory to user space. (CVE-2014-4652, Low)

• It was found that the espfix functionality could be bypassed by
  installing a 16-bit RW data segment into GDT instead of LDT (which espfix
  checks), and using that segment on the stack. A local, unprivileged user
  could potentially use this flaw to leak kernel stack addresses.
  (CVE-2014-8133, Low)

• An information leak flaw was found in the Linux kernel’s IEEE 802.11
  wireless networking implementation. When software encryption was used, a
  remote attacker could use this flaw to leak up to 8 bytes of plaintext.
  (CVE-2014-8709, Low)

• It was found that the Linux kernel KVM subsystem’s sysenter instruction
  emulation was not sufficient. An unprivileged guest user could use this
  flaw to escalate their privileges by tricking the hypervisor to emulate a
  SYSENTER instruction in 16-bit mode, if the guest OS did not initialize the
  SYSENTER model-specific registers (MSRs). Note: Certified guest operating
  systems for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM do initialize the SYSENTER
  MSRs and are thus not vulnerable to this issue when running on a KVM
  hypervisor. (CVE-2015-0239, Low)

Red Hat would like to thank Andy Lutomirski for reporting the CVE-2014-8133
issue, and Nadav Amit for reporting the CVE-2015-0239 issue.

This update fixes several hundred bugs and adds numerous enhancements.
Refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 Release Notes for information on
the most significant of these changes, and the following Knowledgebase
article for further information:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/1466073

All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to correct these issues and add these
enhancements. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.