A flaw was found in the way the Networking component of OpenJDK checked permissions of code to listen on network ports. An untrusted Java application or applet could possibly use this flaw to bypass certain Java sandbox restrictions.
Public now via Oracle CPU January 2014. Fixed in Oracle JDK 7u51, 6u71 and 5.0u61. External References: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/cpujan2014-1972949.html
Related note in the release notes: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/7u51-relnotes-2085002.html Change in Default Socket Permissions The default socket permissions assigned to all code including untrusted code have been changed in this release. Previously, all code was able to bind any socket type to any port number greater than or equal to 1024. It is still possible to bind sockets to the ephemeral port range on each system. The exact range of ephemeral ports varies from one operating system to another, but it is typically in the high range (such as from 49152 to 65535). The new restriction is that binding sockets outside of the ephemeral range now requires an explicit permission in the system security policy. Most applications using client tcp sockets and a security manager will not see any problem, as these typically bind to ephemeral ports anyway. Applications using datagram sockets or server tcp sockets (and a security manager) may encounter security exceptions where none were seen before. If this occurs, users should review whether the port number being requested is expected, and if this is the case, a socket permission grant can be added to the local security policy, to resolve the issue. See 8011786 (not public). Ephemeral port range for Linux is 32768-65535.
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2014:0027 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0027.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2014:0026 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0026.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2014:0030 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0030.html
OpenJDK7 upstream commit: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7u/jdk7u/jdk/rev/e6160aedadd5
Follow-up commit, re-implementing large parts of the above commit: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7u/jdk7u/jdk/rev/e935cd4139c6
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2014:0097 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0097.html
Fixed in: IcedTea7 2.3.13 and 2.4.4: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2014-January/025800.html IcedTea6 1.12.8 and 1.13.1: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2014-January/025947.html OpenJDK 6 B30: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2014-January/003212.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2014:0136 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0136.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2014:0135 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0135.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2014:0134 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0134.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2014:0414 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0414.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Via RHSA-2014:0705 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0705.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Network Satellite Server v 5.4 Red Hat Network Satellite Server v 5.5 Red Hat Satellite Server v 5.6 Via RHSA-2014:0982 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0982.html