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Security flaws in Kernel/X.org

Posted: 19 Aug 2010, 09:59
by viking60
"Invisible Thing Lab" has found a serious security hole in Kernel/X.org that could give intruders full root access to your box with any graphical application via X-server.

A temporary fix was made on the 13th August, and kernel 2.6.27.52, 2.6.32.19, 2.6.34.4, and 2.6.35.2 have now been patched with this fix.

The hole in the security was published yesterday:
http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/ ... in-linux...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cg ... -2010-2240
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7769 ... tml?kc=rss
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... &px=ODUyMA
http://www.invisiblethingslab.com/itl/Welcome.html

Re: Security flaws in Kernel/X.org

Posted: 19 Aug 2010, 10:02
by dedanna1029
Oh yay. Not. You mean I gotta go thru all that xorg crap again? (Fedora and Arch both)

Edit: Tell you what. First one that gets borked from the updates, is the first one I take off my machine. I'm getting real tired of this. They better get it right the first time (wow. I just made a real good joke there 'cause I know it's not gonna happen).


http://twitter.com/dedanna1029/status/21563110698

Re: Security flaws in Kernel/X.org

Posted: 19 Aug 2010, 10:48
by viking60
dedanna1029 wrote:Oh yay. Not. You mean I gotta go thru all that xorg crap again? (Fedora and Arch both)

Edit: Tell you what. First one that gets borked from the updates, is the first one I take off my machine. I'm getting real tired of this. They better get it right the first time (wow. I just made a real good joke there 'cause I know it's not gonna happen).


http://twitter.com/dedanna1029/status/21563110698


No you will probably not be affected by it unless you run a server with other users. The exploit needs an "attacker" and he needs to allocate many large pixmaps. Thus exhausting X-servers address space. Then he must create a shared memory segment S and force X server to attach it to the only available region left, which will be close above the stack. Then the attacker instructs the X-server to call a recursive function which results in the stack being extended and the stack pointer being moved to S for a brief period of time (during recursion).
The attacker can then write to S. This will override the stack locations and allow the code execution = very bad :evil:

There is no error or misbehavior in the software you got so even if you blame it - it probably is just you that fubared :D The evil :twisted: person needs to have access to your system. But when he has that, there is nothing stopping him from exploiting X.

This error has most likely been around for years since kernel 2.6.

Re: Security flaws in Kernel/X.org

Posted: 19 Aug 2010, 17:12
by dedanna1029
Man, I can't even mentally keep up with all that, much less imagine someone doing it LOL. Hard to follow for me.

Re: Security flaws in Kernel/X.org

Posted: 19 Aug 2010, 21:09
by viking60
Basically there has to be person involved - that has access to your computer. And he has to be a bad person - like a politician or something :f
Edit:
Sorry we can rule them out - the person has to be smart too :mrgreen:

Re: Security flaws in Kernel/X.org

Posted: 19 Aug 2010, 22:22
by dedanna1029
viking60 wrote:Basically there has to be person involved - that has access to your computer. And he has to be a bad person - like a politician or something :f
Edit:
Sorry we can rule them out - the person has to be smart too :mrgreen:

*giggles* LOL