Users need to upgrade the operating system as soon as possible

Aug 14, 2014 18:01 GMT  ·  By

A Linux kernel vulnerability has been found in the Linux kernel of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system and it has been corrected by Canonical.

Ubuntu developers have issued a new kernel update for the latest 14.04 LTS release, fixing a small problem that could cause the system to crash under certain conditions.

According to the security notice, “a flaw was discovered in the Linux kernel's audit subsystem when auditing certain syscalls. A local attacker could exploit this flaw to obtain potentially sensitive single-bit values from kernel memory or cause a denial of service.”

More details about this issue can be found in the security notice. Ubuntu users will get the new version via the Software Update.

The security flaws can be fixed if users upgrade the system(s) to the linux-image-3.13.0-33-generic (3.13.0-33.58), but this is only true for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), the only system affected by this vulnerability. ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change, the kernel packages have a new version number, which will force you to reinstall and recompile all third-party kernel modules you might have installed. Moreover, if you use the linux-restricted-modules package, you have to update it as well to get modules that work with the new Linux kernel version.