Federal agency warns critical Linux vulnerability being actively exploited

It's a privilege escalation.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1086 and carrying a severity rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10, allows people who have already gained a foothold inside an affected system to escalate their system privileges. It’s the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated. Use-after-free vulnerabilities can result in remote code or privilege escalation.
- rust mentioned, lets goo
  
  Blazingly fast 🚀
- This is why least privilege is so important. If one account is compromised it will be harder to compromise others if the original account is isolated.
- a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated.
  Immediately I noticed how when Teslas can't drive themselves we also blame the car and not the driver.
  Weak. Blame the driver.
  
  I re-wrote my Tesla firmware in Rust. It is faster and more secure. Self-driving is no problem when you use a safe language.
  Honestly, why are we even selling cars to people who do not take these basic steps?
  
  I compiled my own drivers
  
  Don't think C / C++ wasn't blamed.
  
  And the horse it ride in on!

Outfits that haven't installed patches since February are getting popped in May by a vuln that was published in January.
- Normal technology situations created by normal human behavior. 😜
- Outfits? What does it mean in this context?
  
  Organisations
  
  Suits and shit.
  
  Companies and organizations.
  
  Guns for hire

Yet another security issue that Rust would solve.
- Oh, we heard, Rust is the greatest invention since sliced bread. We heard it already. Like 65534 times.
  
  Like 65534 times.
  So close to full 16-bit max. So close...
  
  Aviation, Health, Space and Car industry have only 3 certified languages that they use. Ada, C and C++. Ada is dying because there are way less young engineers who want to invest their future learning it. Then there is C and C++ but they dont offer memory safety and its really hard to master and its really hard and long (thats what she said) to certify the code when being audited for safety by a tier company.
  Rust solves by default (no need to review) like 2/3 of the standard requirements those industries have and are that found in C and C++. Rust will soon be approved in this group by the car industry.
  Im not a rust fan, but I have 3 things to say about rust.
  Its fun to program like C++ having the peace of mind knowing the compiler is there helping.
  You dont feel like youre defusing a bomb like when writing C.
  Even though its a fun language to write, its also really hard to master, itd say 2 years to be really proficient with it. There is just so much knowledge.
  
  I wonder how many folks are just refusing to use Rust to spite the Rust Evangelism Strike Team.
  
  I hate it when people talk about new technologies 🤬
- Yet another problem that actually updating your shit - which is trivially easy on enterprise Linux - would fix.
  It's part of the 95% of problems solved by actually updating your enterprise Linux host.
  
  unattended-upgrades and forget about it
  
  That requires that the patches be in the repos. With RHEL it might be a few months
  
  But then I can't screenshot my 7 years of uptime
- Any software can have security issues, including ones written in rust. Just because C/C++ allows one to shoot oneself in the foot doesn't mean it's something that's commonly allowed by anyone with any skill, it's just a bug like anything else. I swear, people advocating rust believe that it's something intrinsic in C/C++ that allows such a thing regardless of what a developer does, and it's getting tiresome.
  
  Of course a good developer can avoid these problems for the most part. The point is that we want the bad developers to be forced to do things a safe way by default.
  
  But it is, do you not understand what rust brings compared to these two languages ?
- There are still slight advantages to C that probably will make some devs stick to it in specific cases
  
  But this isn’t one of them
- Serious question, how would using rust avoid this? Rust still has reference types in the background, right? Still has a way to put stuff on the heap too? Those are the only 2 requirements for reusing memory bugs
  
  This is a use-after-free, which should be impossible in safe Rust due to the borrow checker. The only way for this to happen would be incorrect unsafe code (still possible, but dramatically reduced code surface to worry about) or a compiler bug. To allocate heap space in safe Rust, you have to use types provided by the language like Box, Rc, Vec, etc. To free that space (in Rust terminology, dropping it by using drop() or letting it go out of scope) you must be the owner of it and there may be current borrows (i.e. no references may exist). Once the variable is droped, the variable is dead so accessing it is a compiler error, and the compiler/std handles freeing the memory.
  There's some extra semantics to some of that but that's pretty much it. These kind of memory bugs are basically Rust's raison d'etre - it's been carefully designed to make most memory bugs impossible without using unsafe. If you'd like more information I'd be happy to provide!
- The problem is bad programmers. You can write good C code but it takes more effort and security checking. You also can write vulnerable and sloppy Rust code.
- I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a rewrite of code that works. Maybe over time we can start implementing pieces in safer languages.
  
  I admit C++ ain't safe, but wonder if there's an alternative to going Rust. Don't get me wrong, I love the language. But Rust is a beast on its own. I read here that game devs generally can't adapt Rust because the language forces frequent refactoring, which doesn't fit the business speed of game development.
  
  It's realistic if security is a priority.

Is there a way to jailbreak an Android phone using this exploit?
- You could just unlock the bootloader
  
  Assuming the bootloader is unlockable

Is this even new?
I thought this already circulated a few months back.
- Even Debian stable has already patched it.
  
  Debian is actually one of the fastest patchers
  RHEL on the other hand
  
  Security patches do the opposite of break stuff

This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated.
At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation.
A deep-dive write-up of the vulnerability reveals that these exploits provide “a very powerful double-free primitive when the correct code paths are hit.” Double-free vulnerabilities are a subclass of use-after-free errors that occur when the free() function for freeing memory is called more than once for the same location.
The write-up lists multiple ways to exploit the vulnerability, along with code for doing so.
The double-free error is the result of a failure to achieve input sanitization in netfilter verdicts when nf_tables and unprivileged user namespaces are enabled.
Some of the most effective exploitation techniques allow for arbitrary code execution in the kernel and can be fashioned to drop a universal root shell.
The original article contains 351 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Rolling release stays winning
- btw
- Until it doesn't. The problem will rolling releases is that a lot of security issues are introduced quickly. Debian has far fewer security problems than Arch.