USN-5086-1: Linux kernel vulnerability

22 September 2021

IBM s390x systems could be made to crash or run programs as an administrator.

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Details

Johan Almbladh discovered that the eBPF JIT implementation for IBM
s390x systems in the Linux kernel miscompiled operations in some
situations, allowing circumvention of the BPF verifier. A local
attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash)
or possibly execute arbitrary code.

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 21.04
Ubuntu 20.04
Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 16.04

After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make
all the necessary changes.

ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change the kernel updates have
been given a new version number, which requires you to recompile and
reinstall all third party kernel modules you might have installed.
Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages
(e.g. linux-generic, linux-generic-lts-RELEASE, linux-virtual,
linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically perform
this as well.

References

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