Old Linux Kernel Bug Discovered

Mar 21, 2017

The bug was introduced back in 2009 and has been lurking around all this time.

Alexander Popov, one of the winners of the 2016 Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) scholarship, has discovered a very old bug in the Linux kernel that can affect modern systems.

Popov wrote on a mailing list, “This is an announcement of CVE-2017-2636, which is a race condition in the n_hdlc Linux kernel driver (drivers/tty/n_hdlc.c). It can be exploited to gain a local privilege escalation. This driver provides HDLC serial line discipline and comes as a kernel module in many Linux distributions, which have CONFIG_N_HDLC=m in the kernel config.”

Popov fixed the issue by using “standard kernel linked list protected by a spinlock and got rid of n_hdlc.tbuf. In the case of transmission error, the current data buffer is put after the head of tx_buf_list,” he wrote on the mailing list.

The issue is affecting major distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux. According to a Red Hat Bugzilla submission, although RHEL 5 is unaffected, the bug does affect the Linux kernel packages shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2. Because this issue is rated important, it has been scheduled to be fixed in future updates for the respective releases. Canonical has already released a patch; SUSE is working on it.

The bug is old, and the module is used in really old hardware; even if the module is shipped with modern Linux distributions, it’s never loaded by default. However, the module is automatically loaded “if an unprivileged user opens a pseudoterminal and calls TIOCSETD ioctl for it setting N_HDLC line discipline,” explained Popov.

One might wonder why users should worry about it. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explained, because “it's easy to do, which means it's easy for a local user to exploit. Before poo-pooing this as a non-issue, keep in mind that with hosted and cloud computing, many people have ‘local’ access to Linux servers.”

As always, check your distribution and run updates to patch the flaws.

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