[RHSA-2014:0924] kernel security update

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux
operating system.

• It was found that the Linux kernel's ptrace subsystem allowed a traced process' instruction pointer to be set to a non-canonical memory address without forcing the non-sysret code path when returning to user space. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to crash the system or, potentially, escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2014-4699, Important)

Note: The CVE-2014-4699 issue only affected systems using an Intel CPU.

• A flaw was found in the way the pppol2tp_setsockopt() and pppol2tp_getsockopt() functions in the Linux kernel's PPP over L2TP implementation handled requests with a non-SOL_PPPOL2TP socket option level. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to escalate their privileges on the system. (CVE-2014-4943, Important)

Red Hat would like to thank Andy Lutomirski for reporting CVE-2014-4699,
and Sasha Levin for reporting CVE-2014-4943.

All kernel users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to correct these issues. The system must be
rebooted for this update to take effect.