HWE kernel patch also available for Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS users

Mar 7, 2019 08:58 GMT  ·  By

Following yesterday's kernel security patch for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) systems, Canonical released today a new Linux kernel security patch for Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) users.

The Linux kernel security update addresses three vulnerabilities discovered by various security researchers in the upstream Linux kernel. These include a race condition (CVE-2019-6133) discovered by Jann Horn in Linux kernel's fork() system call, which could allow a local attacker to gain access to services caching authorizations.

It also fixes an out of bounds write vulnerability (CVE-2018-16880) was discovered by Jason Wang in Linux kernel's vhost net driver, which could allow an attacker in a guest virtual machine to either execute arbitrary code in the host kernel or cause a denial of service (DoS) crashing the host system.

The new Linux kernel security patch for Ubuntu 18.10 also addresses a flaw (CVE-2018-18397) discovered by Jann Horn in the userfaultd implementation, which improperly restricted access to certain ioctls, thus allowing a local attacker to modify files.

Users are urged to update their systems immediately

If you're using the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system, Canonical recommends you update your systems immediately. The new kernel version you need to update your machines to is linux-image-generic 4.18.0-16.17, which is available in the repositories for 64-bit systems and Snapdragon processors.

Raspberry Pi 2 users must update to linux-image-raspi2 4.18.0-1010.12, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) users should update to linux-image-gcp 4.18.0-1007.8, Microsoft Azure Cloud users will have to update to linux-image-azure 4.18.0-1013.13, and for cloud environments, you must update to linux-image-kvm 4.18.0-1008.8.

Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (Bionic Beaver) who updated their kernels to Linux 4.18 from Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) will also have to update to linux-image-generic 4.18.0-16.17~18.04.1 on 64-bit systems and Snapdragon processors, as well as to linux-image-azure 4.18.0-1013.13~18.04.1 on Microsoft Azure Cloud systems.

To update your installations, please follow the instructions provided by Canonical at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades or simply open the Terminal app and run the "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" commands. Keep in mind that you'll have to reboot your computers after updating the kernel package.