CVE-2016-2069

A flaw was discovered in the way the Linux kernel dealt with paging structures. When the kernel invalidated a paging structure that was not in use locally, it could, in principle, race against another CPU that is switching to a process that uses the paging structure in question. A local user could use a thread running with a stale cached virtual->physical translation to potentially escalate their privileges if the translation in question were writable and the physical page got reused for something critical (for example, a page table).

This issue affects the Linux kernel packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This has been rated as having Moderate security impact and is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/.

This issue affects the Linux kernel packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7 and MRG-2. Future Linux kernel updates for the respective releases might address this issue.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.