Heartbeat: Denial of Service

1. Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Advisory Reference	GLSA 200608-23 / heartbeat
Release Date	August 24, 2006
Latest Revision	September 22, 2006: 02
Impact	normal
Exploitable	remote

Package	Vulnerable versions	Unaffected versions	Architecture(s)
sys-cluster/heartbeat	< 2.0.7	>= 2.0.7, revision >= 1.2.5	All supported architectures

Related bugreports: #141894

Synopsis

Heartbeat is vulnerable to a Denial of Service which can be triggered by a remote attacker without authentication.

2. Impact Information

Background

Heartbeat is a component of the High-Availability Linux project. It is used to perform death-of-node detection, communications and cluster management.

Description

Yan Rong Ge discovered that the peel_netstring() function in cl_netstring.c does not validate the "length" parameter of user input, which can lead to an out-of-bounds memory access when processing certain Heartbeat messages (CVE-2006-3121). Furthermore an unspecified local DoS issue was fixed (CVE-2006-3815).

Impact

By sending a malicious UDP Heartbeat message, even before authentication, a remote attacker can crash the master control process of the cluster.

3. Resolution Information

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Heartbeat users should upgrade to the latest version:

Code Listing 3.1: Resolution

# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose sys-cluster/heartbeat

4. References

Page updated August 24, 2006

Summary: This is a Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

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