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Canonical published today a new set of Linux kernel security updates for all supported Ubuntu releases to address the recently disclosed “MMIO stale data” vulnerabilities discovered in some Intel processors.
On Tuesday, June 14th, 2022, Intel disclosed a series of new hardware vulnerabilities discovered by various security researchers that affect some of its processors. The four vulnerabilities were marked as having a “medium” security impact.
The company released firmware updates to mitigate these potential flaws discovered in the Memory Mapped I/O (MMIO) method, which is used for performing I/O between the CPU and peripheral devices, and urged all hardware and software vendors to update their products.
Canonical released today Linux kernel security updates for all the supported kernel flavors in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 ESM, and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM, addressing three of the four Intel vulnerabilities, namely CVE-2022-21123, CVE-2022-21125, and CVE-2022-21166.
These vulnerabilities caused some Intel processors to fail to completely perform cleanup actions on multi-core shared buffers, microarchitectural fill buffers, as well as during specific special register write operations. They allowed an authenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure (exposing sensitive information) via local access.
The full list of affected Intel processors by the “MMIO stale data” vulnerabilities is available here. Canonical urges all Ubuntu users to update their installations as soon as possible to the new kernel versions (linux-image 5.15.0.39.40 for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, linux-image 5.13.0.51.57 for Ubuntu 21.10, linux-image 5.4.0.120.121 for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, linux-image 5.13.0-51.58~20.04.1 for Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, linux-image 4.15.0.187.173 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and linux-image 5.4.0.120.136~18.04.100 for Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS) which are now available in the stable software repositories.
To update your installations, use either the Software Updater graphical utility or the Terminal app by running the sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade commands. Please keep in mind that you will need to reboot your computer after downloading and installing the new kernel versions to make all the necessary changes, as well as to rebuild and reinstall any third-party kernel modules you might have installed.
Last updated 2 years ago
