The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux operating system. Security Fix: * It was discovered that a remote attacker could leverage the generation of IPv6 atomic fragments to trigger the use of fragmentation in an arbitrary IPv6 flow and could subsequently perform any type of a fragmentation-based attack against legacy IPv6 nodes that do not implement RFC6946. * A flaw was discovered in the way the Linux kernel dealt with paging structures. When the kernel invalidated a paging structure that was not in use locally, it could, in principle, race against another CPU that is switching to a process that uses the paging structure in question. A local user could use a thread running with a stale cached virtual->physical translation to potentially escalate their privileges if the translation in question were writable and the physical page got reused for something critical . * A race condition flaw was found in the ioctl_send_fib function in the Linux kernel"s aacraid implementation. A local attacker could use this flaw to cause a denial of service by changing a certain size value. * It was found that when the gcc stack protector was enabled, reading the /proc/keys file could cause a panic in the Linux kernel due to stack corruption. This happened because an incorrect buffer size was used to hold a 64-bit timeout value rendered as weeks. * It was found that when file permissions were modified via chmod and the user modifying them was not in the owning group or capable of CAP_FSETID, the setgid bit would be cleared. Setting a POSIX ACL via setxattr sets the file permissions as well as the new ACL, but doesn"t clear the setgid bit in a similar way. This could allow a local user to gain group privileges via certain setgid applications. * A flaw was found in the Linux networking subsystem where a local attacker with CAP_NET_ADMIN capabilities could cause an out-of-bounds memory access by creating a smaller-than-expected ICMP header and sending to its destination via sendto. * It was found that the blk_rq_map_user_iov function in the Linux kernel"s block device implementation did not properly restrict the type of iterator, which could allow a local attacker to read or write to arbitrary kernel memory locations or cause a denial of service by leveraging write access to a /dev/sg device. * A flaw was found in the USB-MIDI Linux kernel driver: a double-free error could be triggered for the "umidi" object. An attacker with physical access to the system could use this flaw to escalate their privileges. The CVE-2016-7042 issue was discovered by Ondrej Kozina and the CVE-2016-7097 issue was discovered by Andreas Gruenbacher and Jan Kara . Additional Changes: For detailed information on changes in this release, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 Release Notes and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 Technical Notes linked from the References section.