14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical released new Linux kernel security updates for all supported Ubuntu releases to address various issue discovered by researchers lately in the upstream Linux kernel packages corresponding to the respective Ubuntu version.
Available for Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 ESM (Precise Pangolin) on 32-bit, 64-bit, Raspbbery Pi 2, AWS (Amazon Web Services), GCP (Google Cloud Platform), and cloud environments, the new Linux kernel security updates fix multiple issues that might put your computer and data at risk.
Affecting both Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) releases, the kernel security patch address just one issue, namely a vulnerablity (CVE-2018-15471) discovered by Felix Wilhelm in Linux kernel’s Xen netback driver, which improperly performed input validation under certain circumstances, thus allowing an attacker to crash the vulnerable system via a denial of service (DoS attack) or possible execute arbitrary code.
Both Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS releases received fixes for multiple vulnerabilies, including an issue (CVE-2017-13168) discovered in Linux kernel’s generic SCSI driver and an integer overflow (CVE-2018-16658) found in the CD-ROM driver, both of which could allow a local attacker to expose sensitive information or possible elevate his/her priviledges.
Another integer overflow (CVE-2018-9363), this time discovered in the HID Bluetooth implementation, could allow an attacker to either crash the system or execute arbitrary code. Discovered by Andrey Konovalov, a vulnerability (CVE-2017-16649) made Linux kernel’s CDC USB Ethernet driver improperly validate device descriptors, which could allow a physically proximate attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash) on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) machines.
L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) flaw patched on Ubuntu 12.04 ESM
The Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release received the most attention this time with a total of seven security vulnerabilities fixed, patching issues discovered in the EXT4, F2FS, HFS+, procfs, and KVM implementations. Lastly, for Ubuntu 12.04 ESM users, Canonical also patched the kernel patched against the L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) vulnerability, both local and on virtual machines (CVE-2018-3620 and CVE-2018-3646).
As expected, all users of these Ubuntu releases are urged to update the kernel packages to the new versions as soon as possible. After updating the kernel, you will have to reboot your computer for the changes to take affect, and remember to always keep your installations up-to-date by applying all available updates and security patches from the official repositories.