A flaw was found in the way the Hotspot JVM garbage collector handled phantom references. An untrusted Java application or applet could use this flaw to corrupt JVM memory and, possibly, execute arbitrary code, bypassing Java sandbox restrictions.
Public now via Oracle Critical Patch Update - January 2015. Fixed in Oracle Java SE 5.0u81, 6u91, 7u75, and 8u31. External References: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/cpujan2015-1972971.html#AppendixJAVA
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2015:0068 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0068.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2015:0069 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0069.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Via RHSA-2015:0067 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0067.html
Upstream OpenJDK commits: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7u/jdk7u/hotspot/rev/2ec4b796b1de http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8u/jdk8u/hotspot/rev/01dcaba9b3f3
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2015:0080 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0080.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2015:0079 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0079.html
This issue was fixed in IcedTea6 1.13.6 and IcedTea7 2.5.4: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2015-January/030488.html http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2015-January/030469.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Oracle Java for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2015:0086 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0086.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Via RHSA-2015:0085 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0085.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2015:0136 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0136.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2015:0135 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0135.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Satellite Server v 5.7 Via RHSA-2015:0263 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0263.html
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Satellite Server v 5.6 Via RHSA-2015:0264 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0264.html