Re: Linux kernel race condition with PTRACE_SETREGS (CVE-2013-0871)

[Solar Designer <solar () openwall com>]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 12:24:18PM -0800, Julien Tinnes wrote:
> Linux kernel stack corruption due to race condition with PTRACE_SETREGS

I haven't looked into this closely yet, but at first glance it looks
like the worst Linux kernel vulnerability in a few years.  For distro
vendor kernels (rather than mainline, which was patched almost a month
ago), this is a 0-day.  We need to figure out a few things:

What's the oldest affected kernel version?

Which "stable" and distro vendor kernels are affected?  This does not
appear to be e.g. on Red Hat's Bugzilla yet ... but it's already on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230262

(perhaps the weekend plays a role in the delay of vendor response).

Are all architectures affected?  The ptrace code in the kernel is
naturally somewhat arch-specific, so _maybe_ not all are affected.

The mainline commits from January are by Oleg Nesterov of Red Hat.  Why
wasn't(?) the issue handled with due severity within Red Hat, then -
such that Red Hat would at the very least have a statement on whether
and which of their kernels are affected by now.  My guess is that the
full severity of the issue might not have been understood by Oleg at the
time, but it's only a guess.

Alexander