Red Hat: RHSA-2014:1959-01 Moderate: Kernel Permission Check Flaw

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system.
* It was found that the permission checks performed by the Linux kernel when a netlink message was received were not sufficient. A local, unprivileged user could potentially bypass these restrictions by passing a netlink socket as stdout or stderr to a more privileged process and altering the output of this process. (CVE-2014-0181, Moderate)
Red Hat would like to thank Andy Lutomirski for reporting this issue.
This update also fixes the following bugs:
* Previously, the kernel did not successfully deliver multicast packets when the multicast querier was disabled. Consequently, the corosync utility terminated unexpectedly and the affected storage node did not join its intended cluster. With this update, multicast packets are delivered properly when the multicast querier is disabled, and corosync handles the node as expected. (BZ#902454)
* Previously, the kernel wrote the metadata contained in all system information blocks on a single page of the /proc/sysinfo file. However, when the machine configuration was very extensive and the data did not fit on a single page, the system overwrote random memory regions, which in turn caused data corruption when reading the /proc/sysconf file. With this update, /proc/sysinfo automatically allocates a larger buffer if the data output does not fit the current buffer, which prevents the data corruption. (BZ#1131283)
* Prior to this update, the it_real_fn() function did not, in certain cases, successfully acquire the SIGLOCK signal when the do_setitimer() function used the ITIMER_REAL timer. As a consequence, the current process entered an endless loop and became unresponsive. This update fixes the bug and it_real_fn() no longer causes the kernel to become unresponsive. (BZ#1134654)
All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.