Canonical Pushes First Kernel Live Patch to Fix New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities

And it now looks like the first Kernel Live Patch Security Notice was published by Canonical’s Luis Henriques this past weekend, informing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users that a couple of security issues are affecting the “generic” and “low-latency” 64-bit kernels of the Xenial Xerus release and its official derivatives. The first Linux kernel vulnerability patched in this kernel patch is the infamous “Dirty COW” bug (CVE-2016-5195), a race condition discovered in Linux kernel’s memory manager when handling copy-on-write breakage of read-only memory mappings, which could have allowed a local attacker to gain administrative privileges (root access).