I don’t mean to be crying wolf here but I heard today that a nine year old high-severity security bug exists in all Linux kernels to date (unless they have been patched of course). You can read about it here This is Steve Gibson’s site and an extremely reputable one.
I am just wondering have our kernel/s for Mate been patched or fixed, or still need patching?
Already patched, e.g. 4.4.0-45 on 16.04 contains the fix.
Awesome, thanks! I do have 16.04.
For some context on this, while Dirty COW and Rowhammer / Drammer are worrysome, they are privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
This means for those bugs to even matter, an attacker needs to already have arbitrary code execution on a target machine before using them.
Dirty COW is fixed.
Rowhammer/Drammer are hardware-related meaning they won’t be fixed by software and even Windows / Mac OS are vulnerable to this.
I heard Steve say that the hammer on the Dram couldn’t cause “bits to flip” if the frequency of the hammer is too slow. Seems like you could put in some code to raise a red flag for such high frequency “hammers”, unless the frequency to set this off is something that is at times a normal occurence.