#LPE — Local Privilege Escalation. A class of vulnerabilities that need a local user account on the target machine to reach higher levels of privilege, up to superuser/root

#RCE — Remote Code Execution. A class of vulnerabilities that can be exploited over unprivileged network connections, giving the attacker privileged access to the target machine.

#CopyFail, #DirtyFrag are LPEs that affect Linux systems. LPEs are typically harder to exploit than RCEs.

Hope this helps to avoid Clickbait.

I've done

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled

on some servers that don't need to load additional modules after startup. I've just configured this to run 5 minutes after boot. (Timing was an arbitrary choice.)

This reduces the attack surface and should help mitigate against vulnerabilities exploitable via kernel modules that you don't normally use, at the expense of on-demand loading of modules of course (including e.g. usbhid for remote kvm, so make sure whatever you might need is loaded first).

The setting takes a reboot to undo.

#copyfail #dirtyfrag

It's becoming less and less tolerable for the security of other operating systems to be so far behind those of smartphones.

→ Traditional Linux must catch up to Android Linux. All applications must be properly sandboxed.

#Linux #security #Android #sandbox #CopyFail #DirtyFrag

The recent #Linux page cache write vulnerabilities only bypass one security layer, the traditional file permissions, right? So, any system they can be exploited on lacks defence in depth.

→ More userspace processes should run with NO_NEW_PRIVS.

#CopyFail #DirtyFrag