14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical released a major Linux kernel security patch for all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems to address more than two dozen of vulnerabilities discovered lately in the upstream kernels.
Available for the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), as well as all the official derivatives like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc., the new Linux kernel security patch is here to fix more than 20 security vulnerabilities affecting the Linux 4.18, Linux 4.15, Linux 4.4, and Linux 3.13 kernel series.
Among the fixed issues, we can mention a use-after-free vulnerability in Linux kernel's ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) subsystem, which could allow a physically proximate attacker to crash the system, as well as an information leak discovered in the Bluetooth implementation, which could let an attacker within Bluetooth range to expose sensitive information.
The security patch also addresses an information leak vulnerability discovered in Linux kernel’s KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) subsystem when using nested virtualization, which could let attackers expose sensitive information from the host system to a guest VM, and along with several other KVM vulnerabilities affecting guest machines.
Other flaws patched in this major security update include use-after-free vulnerabilities discovered in Linux kernel’s user- space API for the crypto (af_alg), IPMI, PPP over L2TP, and SCTP implementations, as well as in the NFS41+ subsystem, a race condition in the F2FS file system implementation, along with bugs in the eBPF, SNMP NAT, CAN, mmap, and Btrfs file system implementations, and the USB serial device driver.
Users are urged to update their systems immediately
Users are urged to update their systems immediately to the new kernel versions for their respective Ubuntu releases and architectures. Patched kernels are now available in the official Ubuntu repositories for 32-bit and 64-bit systems, Raspberry Pi 2 devices, cloud environments, OEM processors, Snapdragon processors, as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure Cloud, and Oracle Cloud systems.
HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernels are also available for Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS systems using the Linux 4.18 kernel from Ubuntu 18.10, Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS systems using the Linux 4.15 kernel from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS systems using the Linux 4.4 kernel from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 ESM systems using the Linux 3.13 kernel from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. After applying the new kernel versions, please keep in mind to reboot your systems.