local privilege escalation in kernel

The Linux kernel has a security flaw in all versions used on SuSE products excluding the upcoming SuSE Linux 8.2 distribution. The flaw is known as ptrace/modprobe bug: The local attacker can use ptrace and attach to a modprobe process that is spawned if the user triggers the loading of a kernel module using the kmod kernel module subsystem. This can be done by asking for network protocols that are supplied by kernel modules which are not loaded (yet). The vulnerability allows the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root.