November 4, 2009, 4:00 pm
Notice: Debian 5.0.4, the next point release of Debian ‘lenny’, will include a new default value for the mmap_min_addr tunable. This change will add an additional safeguard against a class of security vulnerabilities known as “NULL pointer dereference” vulnerabilities, but it will need to be overridden when using certain applications. Additional information about this change, including instructions for making this change locally in advance of 5.0.4 (recommended), can be found at: http://wiki.debian.org/mmap_min_addr.
Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a denial of service, sensitive memory leak or privilege escalation. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:
- CVE-2009-3228
Eric Dumazet reported an instance of uninitialized kernel memory in the network packet scheduler. Local users may be able to exploit this issue to read the contents of sensitive kernel memory…
