5-Year-Old Linux Kernel Local Privilege Escalation Flaw Discovered
A 5-year-old serious privilege-escalation vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that affects almost every distro of the Linux operating system, including Redhat, and Ubuntu.
Over a month back, a nine-year-old privilege-escalation vulnerability, dubbed “Dirty COW,” was discovered in the Linux kernel that affected every distro of the open-source operating system, including Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu.
Now, another Linux kernel vulnerability (CVE-2016-8655) that dates back to 2011 disclosed today could allow an unprivileged local user to gain root privileges by exploiting a race condition in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel.
Philip Pettersson, the researcher who discovered the flaw, was able to create an exploit to gain a root shell on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system (Linux Kernel 4.4) and also defeated SMEP/SMAP (Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention/Supervisor Mode Access Prevention) protection to gain kernel code execution abilities.
In other words, a local unprivileged attacker can use this exploit to cause a denial of service (crashing server) or run arbitrary malicious code with administrative privileges on the targeted system.
“A race condition issue leading to a use-after-free flaw was found in the way the raw packet sockets implementation in the Linux kernel networking subsystem handled synchronization while creating the TPACKET_V3 ring buffer,” Red Hat security advisory explains.
“A local user able to open a raw packet socket (requires the CAP_NET_RAW capability) could use this flaw to elevate their privileges on the system.”
This threat creates a potential danger for service providers to have their servers crashed or hacked through this Linux kernel vulnerability.
Source | thehackernews
