Debian: DSA-438-1 Critical: Kernel Privilege Escalation Threat

Paul Starzetz and Wojciech Purczynski of isec.pl discovered a critical
security vulnerability in the memory management code of Linux inside
the mremap(2) system call. Due to missing function return value check
of internal functions a local attacker can gain root privileges.

For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in
version 2.4.18-14.2 of kernel-source, version 2.4.18-14 of alpha
images, version 2.4.18-12.2 of i386 images, version 2.4.18-5woody7
of i386bf images and version 2.4.18-1woody4 of powerpc images.

Other architectures will probably mentioned in a separate advisory or
are not affected (m68k).

For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem is fixed in version
2.4.24-3 for source, i386 and alpha images and version 2.4.22-10 for
powerpc images.

This problem is also fixed in the upstream version of Linux 2.4.25 and
2.6.3.

We recommend that you upgrade your Linux kernel packages immediately.


Upgrade Instructions
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