Synopsis:          Important: kernel security and bug fix update
Advisory ID:       SLSA-2015:2636-1
Issue Date:        2015-12-15
CVE Numbers:       CVE-2015-2925
                   CVE-2015-7613
                   CVE-2015-5307
                   CVE-2015-8104
                   CVE-2015-7872
--

* A flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel's file system
implementation handled rename operations in which the source was inside
and the destination was outside of a bind mount. A privileged user inside
a container could use this flaw to escape the bind mount and, potentially,
escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2015-2925, Important)

* It was found that the x86 ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) is prone to
a denial of service attack inside a virtualized environment in the form of
an infinite loop in the microcode due to the way (sequential) delivering
of benign exceptions such as #AC (alignment check exception) and #DB
(debug exception) is handled. A privileged user inside a guest could use
these flaws to create denial of service conditions on the host kernel.
(CVE-2015-5307, CVE-2015-8104, Important)

* A race condition flaw was found in the way the Linux kernel's IPC
subsystem initialized certain fields in an IPC object structure that were
later used for permission checking before inserting the object into a
globally visible list. A local, unprivileged user could potentially use
this flaw to elevate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2015-7613,
Important)

* It was found that the Linux kernel's keys subsystem did not correctly
garbage collect uninstantiated keyrings. A local attacker could use this
flaw to crash the system or, potentially, escalate their privileges on the
system. (CVE-2015-7872, Important)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* Previously, Human Interface Device (HID) ran a report on an unaligned
buffer, which could cause a page fault interrupt and an oops when the end
of the report was read. This update fixes this bug by padding the end of
the report with extra bytes, so the reading of the report never crosses a
page boundary. As a result, a page fault and subsequent oops no longer
occur.

* The NFS client was previously failing to detect a directory loop for
some NFS server directory structures. This failure could cause NFS inodes
to remain referenced after attempting to unmount the file system, leading
to a kernel crash. Loop checks have been added to VFS, which effectively
prevents this problem from occurring.

* Due to a race whereby the nfs_wb_pages_cancel() and
nfs_commit_release_pages() calls both removed a request from the nfs_inode
struct type, the kernel panicked with negative nfs_inode.npages count. The
provided upstream patch performs the required serialization by holding the
inode i_lock over the check of PagePrivate and locking the request, thus
preventing the race and kernel panic from occurring.

* Due to incorrect URB_ISO_ASAP semantics, playing an audio file using a
USB sound card could previously fail for some hardware configurations.
This update fixes the bug, and playing audio from a USB sound card now
works as expected.

* Inside hugetlb, region data structures were protected by a combination
of a memory map semaphore and a single hugetlb instance mutex. However, a
page-fault scalability improvement backported to the kernel on previous
releases removed the single hugetlb instance mutex and introduced a new
mutex table, making the locking combination insufficient, leading to
possible race windows that could cause corruption and undefined behavior.
This update fixes the problem by introducing a required spinlock to the
region tracking functions for proper serialization. The problem only
affects software using huge pages through hugetlb interface.

The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.
--

SL6
  x86_64
    kernel-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    kernel-debug-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    kernel-debug-devel-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debug-devel-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    kernel-debuginfo-common-i686-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debuginfo-common-x86_64-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    kernel-devel-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    kernel-headers-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    perf-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    python-perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    python-perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
    python-perf-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
  i386
    kernel-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debug-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debug-devel-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-debuginfo-common-i686-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-devel-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    kernel-headers-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    perf-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    python-perf-debuginfo-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
    python-perf-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.i686.rpm
  noarch
    kernel-abi-whitelists-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.noarch.rpm
    kernel-doc-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.noarch.rpm
    kernel-firmware-2.6.32-573.12.1.el6.noarch.rpm

- Scientific Linux Development Team