While investigating issue CVE-2008-0947 reported by MIT Kerboros security team for krb5 version 1.4 and newer, it was discovered that RPC library as shipped with krb5 versions prior to 1.3 (i.e. as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 and 3) is affected by similar problem. Unauthenticated remote attacker could cause application using RPC library (e.g. kadmind) to exit under certain circumstances. Problem exists in RPC library connection handling code that did not properly handle situations when too many connections were opened. Acknowledgements: Red Hat would like to thank MIT for reporting this issue.
This issue was addressed upstream long ago via following patch: http://anonsvn.mit.edu/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/src/lib/rpc/rpc_dtablesize.c?r1=13269&r2=13528
Public now: http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2008-002.txt Lifting embargo.
This issue only affected krb5 package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 and 3. However, default configuration did not affect default configuration. This issue only affected systems configured to use higher resource limit than default 1024 for 'open files'.
This issue was addressed in: Red Hat Enterprise Linux: http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0181.html