A newly disclosed security flaw in the Linux kernel could be leveraged by a local adversary to gain elevated privileges on vulnerable systems to execute arbitrary code, escape containers, or induce a kernel panic.
Tracked as CVE-2022-25636 (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerability impacts Linux kernel versions 5.4 through 5.6.10 and is a result of a heap of out-of-bounds written in the Netfilter subcomponent in the kernel. The issue was discovered by Nick Gregory, a senior threat researcher at Sophos.
“This flaw allows a local attacker with a user account on the system to gain access to out-of-bounds memory, leading to a system crash or a privilege escalation threat,” Red Hat said in an advisory published on February 22, 2022. Similar alerts have been released by Debian, Oracle Linux, SUSE, and Ubuntu.
Netfilter is a framework provided by the Linux kernel that enables various networking-related operations, including packet filtering, network address translation, and port translation.
Specifically, CVE-2022-25636 relates to an issue with incorrect handling of the framework’s hardware offload feature that could be weaponized by a local attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) or possibly execute arbitrary code. Read more:https://bit.ly/3t9aXEk