Re: 10.04 LTS kernel security problem?

[Paul Gear]

On 12/05/11 14:07, Ian Fleming wrote: ... For Ubuntu linux-image-2.6.35-25-generic + covers what is mentioned in the article. Local exploit - meaning the attacker would need physical access to the machine. And there is not much to stop that... Encryption maybe? A quick note about reading security notices: Generally when a security notice says that it has a local exploit, it does not mean that it requires physical access to the machine.  It means that the exploit must originate from code running on the system itself.  This is as opposed to a remote exploit, which can originate from another system, often by sending a specially crafted network packet, or putting data into a network stream that the receiving system does not sanitise appropriately. An example of a local exploit would be privilege escalation, where a program exploits a kernel flaw to raise it from ordinary user status to root status.  Examples of remote exploits are buffer overruns, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, etc. (I'm sure Wikipedia will have useful general summaries of these concepts if you care to search.) To answer the original poster's question: with nearly all vulnerabilities, the main thing ordinary end users can do that directly affects their system's security is keeping up-to-date with security patches (through update manager in the case of Ubuntu).  Other general security best practices which are helpful in various instances are: using good (long) passwords running a firewall filtering email through antivirus using web filtering proxies which block known malware sites having a good network design which limits access to only the required resources (both inbound & outbound) Regards, Paul

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