1. Topic:
A denial of service attack exists in the system log daemon, syslogd.
2. Problem description:
The syslog daemon by default used unix domain stream sockets for receiving
local log connections. By opening a large number of connections to
the log daemon, the user could make the system unresponsive.
Thanks go to Olaf Kirch (okir@monad.swb.de) for noting the vulnerability
and providing patches.
3. Bug IDs fixed: (see bugzilla for more information)
4. Relevant releases/architectures:
Red Hat Linux 6.1:
Red Hat Linux 6.1 is not vulnerable to this security issue. However,
users of Red Hat Linux 6.1/Intel may wish to upgrade to the latest
package to fix a problem in the syslog daemon where log connections
would be reset after the syslog daemon is restarted.
5. Obsoleted by:
None
6. Conflicts with:
None
7. RPMs required:
Intel:
ftp://updates.Red Hat.com/6.1/i386/
sysklogd-1.3.31-14.i386.rpm
Source:
ftp://updates.Red Hat.com/6.1/SRPMS
sysklogd-1.3.31-14.src.rpm
8. Solution:
For each RPM for your particular architecture, run:
rpm -Uvh filename
where filename is the name of the RPM.
libc updates are needed for Red Hat Linux 4.2 for the Intel and Sparc
architectures so that logging will work correctly with the upgraded sysklogd
packages.
Note: Upgrading to these sysklogd packages may impair the logging abilities
of some software that does not use the standard C library syslog(3) interface
to the system logs. Such software may have to be changed to use datagram
connections instead of stream connections to the log socket.
9. Verification:
MD5 sum Package Name
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
8e59b61b8b1a9356ea675d7234b801d8 i386/sysklogd-1.3.31-14.i386.rpm
55cc22adb6b3272ef23763e89309af24 SRPMS/sysklogd-1.3.31-14.src.rpm
These packages are GPG signed by Red Hat, Inc. for security. Our key
is available at:
http://www.Red Hat.com/corp/contac
t.html
You can verify each package with the following command:
rpm --checksig filename
If you only wish to verify that each package has not been corrupted or
tampered with, examine only the md5sum with the following command:
rpm --checksig --nogpg filename
Note that you need RPM >= 3.0 to check GnuPG keys.
10. References:
