Samba: Remote printing non-vulnerability — GLSA 200409-14

Samba has a bug with out of sequence print change notification requests, but it cannot be used to perform a remote denial of service attack.

Affected packages

Background

Samba is a freely available SMB/CIFS implementation which allows seamless interoperability of file and print services to other SMB/CIFS clients.

Description

Due to a bug in the printer_notify_info() function, authorized users could potentially crash their smbd process by sending improperly handled print change notification requests in an invalid order. Windows XP SP2 clients can trigger this behavior by sending a FindNextPrintChangeNotify() request before previously sending a FindFirstPrintChangeNotify() request.

Impact

We incorrectly thought that this bug could be exploited to deny service to all Samba users. It is not the case, this bug has no security impact whatsoever. Many thanks to Jerry Carter from the Samba team for correcting our mistake.

Workaround

There is no need for a workaround.

Resolution

Samba users can keep their current versions.

References

Release date
September 09, 2004

Latest revision
May 22, 2006: 03

Severity
low

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries