Koozali.org: home of the SME Server

Kernel and safety

Thor Anthrax

Kernel and safety
« on: December 02, 2003, 01:18:47 PM »
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl/12/01/2133249&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=185&tid=90

'Forensics revealed a burneye encrypted exploit. Robert van der Meulen managed to decrypt the binary which revealed a kernel exploit. Study of the exploit by the RedHat and SuSE kernel and security teams quickly revealed that the exploit used an integer overflow in the brk system call. Using this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into giving access to the full kernel address space'. This issue has been fixed in 2.4.23. Thus, the Linux kernel compromise was not Debian specific."

Reinhold

Re: Kernel and safety
« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2003, 11:41:24 PM »
Thor,

(i) my sme 6.0 installations says:
root]# rpm -q kernel
kernel-2.4.20-18.7

(ii) I have read your link

...but what is the real relevance to SME ?
...a file- mail-, maybe print-server without "userland" progs ...

Do I have a misconception problem? Please enlighten me!

Reinhold