RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:

During an effort to ignore IKEv2 minor version numbers as required for RFC-5996, complete parse errors of any IKE packets with version 2.1+ were mistakenly accepted for further processing. This causes a crash later on if the IKE packet is mangled (e.g. too short). Openswan turns out not to be vulnerable because it happens to abort on the mismatched IKE length versus packet length before it inspects the rest of the IKE header. And since reading an invalid IKE major aborts further parsing of the IKE header, the length remains at 0, and so it will always mismatch.

We mention this bug, because if the ike_pad= feature is ever backported from libreswan to openswan, this would actually open up a crasher (like in libreswan 3.6)


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
2.6.32-12 (rhel 6.x) and 2.6.32-4 (rhel 5.1x) and upstream in openswan 2.6.38+ 


As openswan is currently not vulnerable for this bug, no release is required. However, this bug should be addressed if/when a new openswan package is going to be released - especially if the ike_pad= code is backported, which would expose this bug to a vulnerability.

This code was backported already for CVE-2013-6467 and has been included in openswan-2.6.32-27.2