full-disclosure - [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory

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Message-ID: <20031201225825.GA3717@deneb.enyo.de>
From: fw at deneb.enyo.de (Florian Weimer)
Subject: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory

debian-security-announce@...ts.debian.org wrote:

> Recently multiple servers of the Debian project were compromised using a
> Debian developers account and an unknown root exploit. 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 problem was found
> in September by Andrew Morton, but unfortunately that was too late for
> the 2.4.22 kernel release.

Does this mean that the vendor-sec concept has failed, or that there is
a leak on that list?  Or is this just an issue which is very specific to
Linux and its maintainer situation?