Due to integer underflow and overflow issues when determining the number of pages required for maliciously crafted I/O requests, a local user could send a device ioctl that results in the sequential allocation of a very large number of pages, causing the OOM killer to be invoked and crashing the system: Proposed patch: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/axboe/linux-2.6-block.git;a=commit;h=cb4644cac4a2797afc847e6c92736664d4b0ea34 Acknowledgements: Red Hat would like to thank Dan Rosenberg for reporting this issue.
Statement: This issue did not affect the versions of Linux kernel as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 as they did not backport the upstream commit c5dec1c3 that introduced the issue. This has been addressed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG via https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0007.html and https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0330.html.
Upstream commit: http://git.kernel.org/linus/cb4644cac4a2797afc847e6c92736664d4b0ea34
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2011:0007 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0007.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: MRG for RHEL-5 Via RHSA-2011:0330 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0330.html