Two New Vulnerabilities Provide Root Access on Linux
Two new vulnerabilities affecting Linux were uncovered this week that could potentially be used by malicious hackers to gain root privileges. One vulnerability, which was reported on Tuesday by security firm VSR, arises from a flaw in the implementation of the Reliable Datagram Sockets protocol (RDS) in versions 2.6.30 through 2.6.36-rc8 of the Linux kernel.
Known as CVE-2010-3904, the bug could allow a local attacker to issue specially crafted socket function calls to write arbitrary values into kernel memory and thereby escalate privileges to root, giving the attacker "superuser," administrator status.
The problem exists only in Linux installations in which the CONFIG_RDS kernel configuration option is set, and where there are no restrictions preventing unprivileged users from loading packet family modules, "as is the case on most stock distributions," VSR notes.
