The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. Security fixes: * an array index error was found in the gdth driver. A local user could send a specially-crafted IOCTL request that would cause a denial of service or, possibly, privilege escalation. * a flaw was found in the FUSE implementation. When a system is low on memory, fuse_put_request could dereference an invalid pointer, possibly leading to a local denial of service or privilege escalation. * Tavis Ormandy discovered a deficiency in the fasync_helper implementation. This could allow a local, unprivileged user to leverage a use-after-free of locked, asynchronous file descriptors to cause a denial of service or privilege escalation. * the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers team reported the RHSA-2009:1243 update introduced two flaws in the routing implementation. If an attacker was able to cause a large enough number of collisions in the routing hash table for the emergency route flush to trigger, a deadlock could occur. Secondly, if the kernel routing cache was disabled, an uninitialized pointer would be left behind after a route lookup, leading to a kernel panic. * the RHSA-2009:0225 update introduced a rewrite attack flaw in the do_coredump function. A local attacker able to guess the file name a process is going to dump its core to, prior to the process crashing, could use this flaw to append data to the dumped core file. This issue only affects systems that have "/proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable" set to 2 . The fix for CVE-2006-6304 changes the expected behavior: With suid_dumpable set to 2, the core file will not be recorded if the file already exists. For example, core files will not be overwritten on subsequent crashes of processes whose core files map to the same name. * an information leak was found in the Linux kernel. On AMD64 systems, 32-bit processes could access and read certain 64-bit registers by temporarily switching themselves to 64-bit mode. * the RHBA-2008:0314 update introduced N_Port ID Virtualization support in the qla2xxx driver, resulting in two new sysfs pseudo files, "/sys/class/scsi_host/[a qla2xxx host]/vport_create" and "vport_delete". These two files were world-writable by default, allowing a local user to change SCSI host attributes. This flaw only affects systems using the qla2xxx driver and NPIV capable hardware. * permission issues were found in the megaraid_sas driver. The "dbg_lvl" and "poll_mode_io" files on the sysfs file system had world-writable permissions. This could allow local, unprivileged users to change the behavior of the driver. * a NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the firewire-ohci driver used for OHCI compliant IEEE 1394 controllers. A local, unprivileged user with access to /dev/fw* files could issue certain IOCTL calls, causing a denial of service or privilege escalation. The FireWire modules are blacklisted by default, and if enabled, only root has access to the files noted above by default. * a buffer overflow flaw was found in the hfs_bnode_read function in the HFS file system implementation. This could lead to a denial of service if a user browsed a specially-crafted HFS file system, for example, by running "ls". Bug fix documentation for this update will be available shortly from www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/errata/RHSA-2010-0046/Kernel_Security_Update/ index.html Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.