Linux 2.6 kernel flawed
THE LINUX 2.6 kernel suffers from multiple security vulnerabilities, according to the advisory outfit Secunia.
The four vulnerabilities, which rate a medium warning, mean that local users to gain access to potentially sensitive information, cause a denial of service attack, or bypass certain security restrictions.
The first flaw is caused by insufficient permission checking in the "shmctl()" function. Once written to disk, sensitive information could be revealed to anyone with read access to the swap area, or physical access to the machine.
A second flaw concerns a race condition in the terminal handling of the "setsid()" function used for starting new process sessions.
A third vulnerability involves table sizes set in the source file for ASCII national language support. Apparently these table sizes are incorrectly set to 128 instead of 256 and can be exploited to cause buffer overflows.
