Dereferencing a user pointer directly from kernel-space without going through the copy_from_user family of functions is a bad idea. Two of such usages can be found in the sendmsg code path called from sendmmsg, added by upstream commit c71d8ebe7a4496fb7231151cb70a6baa0cb56f9a. Usages are performed through memcmp() and memcpy() directly. Upstream fix: http://git.kernel.org/linus/bc909d9ddbf7778371e36a651d6e4194b1cc7d4c Acknowledgements: Red Hat would like to thank Tetsuo Handa for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Mathieu Desnoyers as the original reporter.
Statement: This issue did not affect the versions of Linux kernel as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG as they did not provide support for the sendmmsg syscall. This has been addressed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 via https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0350.html.
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2012:0350 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0350.html