![Two New Linux Vulnerabilities Discovered, Allowing Root Privileges for Attackers]()
Two New Linux Vulnerabilities Discovered, Allowing Root Privileges for Attackers
Oct 30, 2010
Cybersecurity / System Administration
Two new vulnerabilities affecting Linux were uncovered this week. These vulnerabilities could potentially allow malicious hackers to gain root privileges. CVE-2010-3904: Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) Protocol Vulnerability The first vulnerability, reported on Tuesday by security firm VSR, arises from a flaw in the implementation of the Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) protocol in versions 2.6.30 through 2.6.36-rc8 of the Linux kernel. Known as CVE-2010-3904 , this bug could allow a local attacker to issue specially crafted socket function calls. This would enable the attacker to write arbitrary values into kernel memory, thereby escalating their privileges to root and gaining "superuser" status. The problem exists only in Linux installations where the CONFIG_RDS kernel configuration option is set and there are no restrictions preventing unprivileged users from loading packet family modules. This is the case for most stock distributions, as VSR notes. A proof-of-concept e...
