by it tries to check the ownership of the parent process's session keyring whether or not the parent has a session keyring [CVE-2010-2960]. This results in the following oops: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000000000000a0 IP: [] keyctl_session_to_parent+0x251/0x443 ... Call Trace: [] ? keyctl_session_to_parent+0x67/0x443 [] ? __do_fault+0x24b/0x3d0 [] sys_keyctl+0xb4/0xb8 [] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b if the parent process has no session keyring. If the system is using pam_keyinit then it mostly protected against this as all processes derived from a login will have inherited the session keyring created by pam_keyinit during the log in procedure. To test this, pam_keyinit calls need to be commented out in /etc/pam.d/. Reported-by: Tavis Ormandy Signed-off-by: David Howells Acked-by: Tavis Ormandy Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Mïç