[ntp:questions] What to do for clients less than 4.2.8?

Rob nomail at example.com
Sun Dec 21 12:25:07 UTC 2014


David Woolley <david at ex.djwhome.demon.invalid> wrote:
> Paranoia?  Security alerts are generally not that explicit (and this one 
> is actually unusually explicit) because they provide information to the 
> hackers.

That is usually obtained anyway be reverse-engineering the fix.
In this case that is more difficult because an entire new release was
pushed out as a fix.

> There are only two places where crypto_recv is called.  One is 
> definitely only active if autokey has been explicitly configured.  The 
> other is only active for broadcast clients and the comments imply that 
> it is only used for autokey, but it does seem possible that it is the 
> remote side that decides this (I didn't follow the code any deeper); it 
> is in the initial broadcast client handshake.

Ok that should make servers on internet less vulnerable.  Maybe an
attack can be done on a local network but I am not worried about that.

> I'm using 4.2.7p333, rather than the latest 4.2.7 source code.

Most interesting is of course the situation in 4.2.6p5
In 4.2.7 there are already changes that may have partly fixed this.

> "Carefully crafted" in alerts generally means that the data has to look 
> like the address of some instructions and those instructions, with the 
> exact memory layout under which that instance is running.  It also 
> normally assumes that the machine doesn't have stack execution 
> permission disabled for ntpd.

Of course I run ntpd as a dedicated user ntp and in a chroot.
That should also limit the impact.
This is default on OpenSUSE.  I think in Debian the separate user
is default but the chroot isn't.



More information about the questions mailing list