On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 03:33 +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote: > Unlike device or filesystem modules, most protocol modules may be auto- > loaded on behalf of local users without any special capabilities. This > means that security vulnerabilities in such protocol modules may be > exploitable by local users even on a system where there is no need for > the protocol. > > Protocol modules are requested via module aliases generated from the > protocol-family, protocol and type numbers passed to socket(). > Administrators can of course blacklist the modules or disable their > aliases, but there is an ever-growing list of protocols. There has been > some discussion upstream of providing a means to disable or restrict > this auto-loading altogether, but this is currently unresolved. [...]
The AX.25 protocol modules (ax25, netrom, rose) have not had a great security record recently, and are not widely used. What do you think of moving the module aliases into ax25-tools, so systems without that package are not vulnerable to security flaws in the kernel modules? Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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