Bug 567530 - kernel: RTO (Retransmission Timeouts) Remote DoS
Summary: kernel: RTO (Retransmission Timeouts) Remote DoS
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
high
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Red Hat Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 567532
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2010-02-23 07:43 UTC by Eugene Teo (Security Response)
Modified: 2019-09-29 12:34 UTC (History)
8 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2012-03-28 08:15:46 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Eugene Teo (Security Response) 2010-02-23 07:43:58 UTC
Description of problem:
Make sure, that TCP has a nonzero RTT estimation after three-way handshake. Currently, a listening TCP has a value of 0 for srtt, rttvar and rto right after the three-way handshake is completed with TCP timestamps disabled. This will lead to corrupt RTO recalculation and retransmission flood when RTO is recalculated on backoff reversion as introduced in "Revert RTO on ICMP destination unreachable"
(f1ecd5d9e7366609d640ff4040304ea197fbc618). This behaviour can be provoked by connecting to a server which "responds first" (like SMTP) and rejecting every packet after the handshake with dest-unreachable, which will lead to softirq
load on the server (up to 30% per socket in some tests).

Thanks to Ilpo Jarvinen for providing debug patches and to Denys Fedoryshchenko for reporting and testing.

Changes since v3: Removed bad characters in patchfile.

Reported-by: Denys Fedoryshchenko <denys.lb>
Signed-off-by: Damian Lukowski <damian.de>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem>

Upstream commit:
http://git.kernel.org/linus/598856407d4e20ebb4de01a91a93d89325924d43

"Revert RTO on ICMP destination unreachable" was introduced in:
http://git.kernel.org/linus/f1ecd5d9e7366609d640ff4040304ea197fbc618 (v2.6.32-rc1)

Reference:
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/38355

Comment 1 Eugene Teo (Security Response) 2010-02-23 07:47:19 UTC
Not vulnerable. This issue did not affect the versions of the Linux kernel as
shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG. Shipped kernels do not include upstream commit f1ecd5d9e that introduced the problem.

Comment 4 Fedora Update System 2010-02-28 00:34:35 UTC
kernel-2.6.32.9-67.fc12 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 12.
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/kernel-2.6.32.9-67.fc12

Comment 5 Chuck Ebbert 2010-02-28 00:45:42 UTC
Fixed in Fedora:

  2.6.32.9-37.fc11
  2.6.32.9-66.fc12

We can't mark this bug as fixed in Bodhi because it transforms the entire update into a security update even though no released Fedora kernel has this bug.


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