Serious Linux Security Hole Found in Kernel

October 22, 2010
By Developer.com Staff

Reliable Datagram Sockets was created by Oracle.

According to Oracle, RDS provides "in order, non-duplicating, highly available, low overhead, reliable delivery of datagrams between hundreds of thousands of non-connected endpoints."

And now it's killing Linux.

Well, it's not killing Linux, but it has created a really awful security hole. Since kernel 2.6.30 when RDS was included, any remote hacker has been able to gain root access on your Linux server.

This hole only effects machines running RDS, but it's still a serious problem. Linus Torvalds has a patch available if you want to recompile your kernel by hand, or you can wait for the upstream distributions to push out the fix.

View Article

0 Comments (click to add your comment)

Comment and Contribute

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Solid state disks (SSDs) made a splash in consumer technology, and now the technology has its eyes on the enterprise storage market. Download this eBook to see what SSDs can do for your infrastructure and review the pros and cons of this potentially game-changing storage technology.