CVE-2010-3859

Red Hat statement

Red Hat is aware of this issue and is tracking it via the following bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/CVE-2010-3859. This issue did not affect the version of Linux kernel as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 6 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG as they did not include support for Transparent Inter-Process Communication Protocol (TIPC). A future kernel update in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 may address this flaw. As a preventive measure, we plan to include the fixes in a future kernel update in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

Red Hat mitigation

For users that do not run applications that use TIPC, you can prevent the TIPC module from being loaded by adding the following entry to the end of the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file: blacklist tipc This way, the TIPC module cannot be loaded accidentally, which may occur if an application that requires TIPC is started. A reboot is not necessary for this change to take effect but do make sure the module is not loaded in the first place. You can verify that by running: lsmod | grep tipc You may also consider removing the CAP_SYS_MODULE capability from the current global capability set to prevent kernel modules from being loaded or unloaded. The CAP_SYS_MODULE has a capability number of 16 (see linux/capability.h). The default value has all the bits set. To remove this capability, you have to clear the 16th bit of the default 32-bit value, e.g. 0xffffff ^ (1 << 16): echo 0xFFFEFFFF > /proc/sys/kernel/cap-bound