Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.0 RHSA-2009:0009-02 Critical Kernel Updates

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.
These updated packages address the following security issues:
* Tavis Ormandy discovered a deficiency in the Linux kernel 32-bit and 64-bit emulation. This could allow a local, unprivileged user to prepare and run a specially-crafted binary which would use this deficiency to leak uninitialized and potentially sensitive data. (CVE-2008-0598, Important)
* Olaf Kirch reported a flaw in the i915 kernel driver that only affects the Intel G33 series and newer. This flaw could, potentially, lead to local privilege escalation. (CVE-2008-3831, Important)
* Miklos Szeredi reported a missing check for files opened with O_APPEND in sys_splice(). This could allow a local, unprivileged user to bypass the append-only file restrictions. (CVE-2008-4554, Important)
* a deficiency was found in the Linux kernel Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) implementation. This could lead to a possible denial of service if one end of a SCTP connection did not support the AUTH extension. (CVE-2008-4576, Important)
* Wei Yongjun reported a flaw in the Linux kernel SCTP implementation. In certain code paths, sctp_sf_violation_paramlen() could be called with a wrong parameter data type. This could lead to a possible denial of service. (CVE-2008-4618, Important)
* when fput() was called to close a socket, the __scm_destroy() function in the Linux kernel could make indirect recursive calls to itself. This could, potentially, lead to a denial of service issue. (CVE-2008-5029, Important)
* the ext2 and ext3 filesystem code failed to properly handle corrupted data structures, leading to a possible local denial of service issue when read or write operations were performed. (CVE-2008-3528, Low)
These updated packages also address numerous bugs, including the following:
* several System on Chip (SoC) audio drivers allocated memory in the platform device probe function but did not free this memory in the event of an error. Instead, the memory was freed in the device probe function's error path. This could result in a 'double free' error. With this update, errors cause memory to be freed correctly.
* when a check was made to see if the netlink attribute fitted into available memory, the value returned, "remaining", could become negative due to alignment in nla_next(). GCC set "remaining" to unsigned when testing against the sizeof(*nla), however. As a consequence, the test would always succeed and the function nla_for_each_attr() could, potentially, access memory outside the received buffer. With this update, sizeof is cast to an integer, ensuring sizeof(*nla) does a signed test and prevents an illegal memory de-reference.
* if a user-space process used a SIGIO notification and did not disable it before closing the file descriptor, a stale pointer was left in the async_queue of the real-time clock. When a different user-space process subsequently used a SIGIO notification, the kernel de-referenced this pointer and crashed. With this updated kernel, SIGIO notifications are disabled when the file descriptor is closed, preventing this.
* the real-time kernel included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux MRG did not randomize exec, heap or libc addresses. This update corrects this omission: exec, heap and libc addresses are now randomized.
Numerous other bug fixes included with this update are noted in the Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.0 Real Time Security Update Release Note, available at the location noted in the References section below.
All Red Hat Enterprise MRG users should install this update which addresses these vulnerabilities and fixes these bugs.