Debian Security Advisory DSA 4188-1 (linux - security update)

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service or information leaks. CVE-2017-5715 Multiple researchers have discovered a vulnerability in various processors supporting speculative execution, enabling an attacker controlling an unprivileged process to read memory from arbitrary addresses, including from the kernel and all other processes running on the system. This specific attack has been named Spectre variant 2 (branch target injection) and is mitigated for the x86 architecture (amd64 and i386) by using the retpoline compiler feature which allows indirect branches to be isolated from speculative execution. CVE-2017-5753 Multiple researchers have discovered a vulnerability in various processors supporting speculative execution, enabling an attacker controlling an unprivileged process to read memory from arbitrary addresses, including from the kernel and all other processes running on the system. This specific attack has been named Spectre variant 1 (bounds-check bypass) and is mitigated by identifying vulnerable code sections (array bounds checking followed by array access) and replacing the array access with the speculation-safe array_index_nospec() function. Description truncated. Please see the references for more information.

linux on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

For the stable distribution (stretch), these problems have been fixed in version 4.9.88-1. We recommend that you upgrade your linux packages. For the detailed security status of linux please refer to its security tracker page linked in the references.