Fri, 27 Aug 2010
Impact of CVE-2010-2959 on Debian systems
CVE-2010-2959 allows to exploit an integer overflow in the CAN protocol driver to escalate privileges to root.
This requires the CAN BCM module (can_bcm) to be loaded, so its impact is either null or easily mitigated since it is never used on normal systems.
If this command finds the alias needed to autoload the module then an unpatched system is vulnerable:
grep can-proto-2 /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.alias -r /etc/modprobe.d/
In practice, the combination of the unpatched lenny kernel and module-init-tools packages are not (normally) vulnerable because the alias does not exist, while more recent kernels are: nowadays kernel modules carry their own built-in aliases, which are collected by depmod(8).