Linux » Linux Kernel : Security Vulnerabilities, CVEs, Published In October 2017 (Overflow)

Linux distributions that have not patched their long-term kernels with https://git.kernel.org/linus/a87938b2e246b81b4fb713edb371a9fa3c5c3c86 (committed on April 14, 2015). This kernel vulnerability was fixed in April 2015 by commit a87938b2e246b81b4fb713edb371a9fa3c5c3c86 (backported to Linux 3.10.77 in May 2015), but it was not recognized as a security threat. With CONFIG_ARCH_BINFMT_ELF_RANDOMIZE_PIE enabled, and a normal top-down address allocation strategy, load_elf_binary() will attempt to map a PIE binary into an address range immediately below mm->mmap_base. Unfortunately, load_elf_ binary() does not take account of the need to allocate sufficient space for the entire binary which means that, while the first PT_LOAD segment is mapped below mm->mmap_base, the subsequent PT_LOAD segment(s) end up being mapped above mm->mmap_base into the are that is supposed to be the "gap" between the stack and the binary.

arch/x86/kvm/mmu.c in the Linux kernel through 4.13.5, when nested virtualisation is used, does not properly traverse guest pagetable entries to resolve a guest virtual address, which allows L1 guest OS users to execute arbitrary code on the host OS or cause a denial of service (incorrect index during page walking, and host OS crash), aka an "MMU potential stack buffer overrun."