Description: Red Hat has issued updated 2.4 kernel packages to fix two information disclosure vulnerabilities in Red Hat's version 2.4.18 of the kernel.
The first problem is caused by many ethernet NIC (Network Interface Card) device drivers padding frames with content from previous packets or kernel memory instead of using NULL-bytes. This may be exploited by malicious people to obtain potentially sensitive information by sending specially crafted packets to a vulnerable system.
The second problem lies in the ext2 file system's O_DIRECT routine used to remove the CPU and memory bandwidth spent when copying between the kernel cache and userspace memory. A user with write privileges to the file system is able to exploit the problem to read information from previously deleted files. Red Hat is not affected by this vulnerability by default since it the ext3 file system is used, which doesn't support O_DIRECT.
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