Overview
There is a buffer overflow defect in the ctl_getitem() function of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon responsible for providing accurate time reports used for synchronizing the clocks on installed systems. All NTP daemons based on code maintained at the University of Delaware since NTPv2 are assumed at risk.
Description
The buffer overflow condition appears in the ctl_getitem() function in ntp_control.c, the NTP control code. Because the ntp protocol uses UDP, attacks attempting to exploit this vulnerability will likely be spoofed. |
Impact
It has been reported that a remote intruder can execute arbitrary code with the default privileges on the running daemon, typically root. While this report is still being evaluated, crashing of the NTP daemon has been confirmed. |
Solution
Apply patches supplied by your vendor |
Until patches can be applied, the CERT/CC strongly urges affected sites to block ntp requests (123/{tcp,udp}) at their network perimeter or disable ntpd altogether. It is unclear at this time if using secured NTP services provides a full defense against all attacks attempting to exploit this vulnerability. |
Vendor Information
Berkeley Software Design, Inc. Affected
Compaq Computer Corporation Affected
Debian Linux Affected
FreeBSD, Inc. Affected
Hewlett-Packard Company Affected
IBM Corporation Affected
Mandriva, Inc. Affected
NetBSD Affected
OpenBSD Affected
Red Hat, Inc. Affected
SUSE Linux Affected
Slackware Affected
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Affected
Notified: April 05, 2001 Updated: October 31, 2001
Status
Affected
Vendor Statement
Please see Sun Security Bulletin #00211, also available for download at:
http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?type=0&doc=secbull%2F211&display=plain
Vendor Information
The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.
Addendum
Download: 
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________________________________________________________________________________
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Security Bulletin
Bulletin Number: #00211
Date: October 23, 2001
Cross-Ref: CERT Vulnerability Note VU#970472
Title: xntpd
________________________________________________________________________________
The information contained in this Security Bulletin is provided "AS IS."
Sun makes no warranties of any kind whatsoever with respect to the information
contained in this Security Bulletin. ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED CONDITIONS,
REPRESENTATIONS AND WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTY OF NON-INFRINGEMENT OR
IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE
HEREBY DISCLAIMED AND EXCLUDED TO THE EXTENT ALLOWED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
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If any of the above provisions are held to be in violation of applicable law,
void, or unenforceable in any jurisdiction, then such provisions are waived
to the extent necessary for this disclaimer to be otherwise enforceable in
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________________________________________________________________________________
1. Bulletins Topics
Sun announces the release of patches for Solaris(tm) 8, 7, and
2.6 (SunOS(tm) 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6) which relate to a vulnerability
in xntpd(1M), the Network Time Protocol daemon.
Sun recommends that you install the patches listed in section 4
on systems running SunOS 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6 which use xntpd.
2. Who is Affected
Vulnerable: SunOS 5.8, 5.8_x86, 5.7, 5.7_x86, 5.6,
5.6_x86
The xntpd(1M) daemon was not shipped by Sun for earlier releases
than Solaris 2.6.
3. Understanding the Vulnerability
The xntpd is a daemon which sets and maintains a UNIX system
time-of-day in agreement with Internet standard time servers.
xntpd is a complete implementation of the Network Time Protocol
(NTP) version 3 standard, as defined by RFC 1305.
CERT Vulnerability Note VU#970472 is available from:
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/970472
4. List of Patches
The following patches are available in relation to the above issue.
OS Version Patch ID
__________ _________
SunOS 5.8 109667-04
SunOS 5.8_x86 109668-04
SunOS 5.7 109409-04
SunOS 5.7_x86 109410-03
SunOS 5.6 107298-03
SunOS 5.6_x86 107299-03
_______________________________________________________________________________
APPENDICES
A. Patches listed in this bulletin are available to all Sun customers at:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/securitypatch
B. Checksums for the patches listed in this bulletin are available at:
ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/CHECKSUMS
C. Sun security bulletins are available at:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/security
D. Sun Security Coordination Team's PGP key is available at:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/pgpkey.txt
E. To report or inquire about a security problem with Sun software, contact
one or more of the following:
- Your local Sun answer centers
- Your representative computer security response team, such as CERT
- Sun Security Coordination Team. Send email to:
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mailing list, send email to:
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________________________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun,
Sun Microsystems, Solaris and SunOS are trademarks or registered trademarks
of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. This
Security Bulletin may be reproduced and distributed, provided that this
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If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email.
The SCO Group (SCO Linux) Affected
The SCO Group (SCO Unix) Affected
Updated: April 16, 2001
Status
Affected
Vendor Statement
We have not received a statement from the vendor.
Vendor Information
The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.
Addendum
The CERT/CC has read but not verified the following statement from SCO posted on BUGTRAQ:
Message-Id: <3AD4B69C.913A849D@sco.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 12:55:08 -0700
From: Albert Fu <alf@sco.COM>
Organization: SCO
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; SCO_SV 3.2 i386)
X-Accept-Language: en
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
Sender: owner-bugtraq@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
Subject: SSE073: SCO OpenServer NTP buffer overflow fix
---------------------------------------------------
TOPIC: NTP remote buffer overflow
PRODUCTS AFFECTED: SCO OpenServer 5.0.0->5.0.6
PATCH: System Security Supplement (SSE) SSE073
PATCH LOCATION: ftp://ftp.sco.com/SSE/sse073.tar.Z
ftp://ftp.sco.com/SSE/sse073.ltr
SUMMARY: potentially exploitable buffer overflow fixed by SSE073
DATE: April 11, 2001
---------------------------------------------------
System Security Enhancement (SSE) SSE073 - 11-Apr-2001
Problem:
A buffer overflow was found by Przemyslaw Frasunek
<venglin@freebsd.lublin.pl> in the NTP daemon. Full exploit details
can be found in the BUGTRAQ archive
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/174011
On SCO OpenServer 5 Release 5.0.6 systems, the NTP daemon is /etc/ntpd.
This exploit doesn't actually "work" on OpenServer. However, a small
effect can be observed.
To observe the effect, run ntpdc and give it the "ctlstats" command.
An exploit attempt registers as an increment of 2 to the
"requests received" and "responses sent" counters.
Running the fixed version of ntpd, an exploit attempt registers as +2
"requests received", +2 "responses sent", +1 "total bad pkts" and +1
"error msgs sent".
We find this difference sufficient to feel confident that the _specific_
problem has been corrected.
Patch:
The patch is located at: ftp://ftp.sco.com/SSE/sse073.tar.Z
ftp://ftp.sco.com/SSE/sse073.ltr
This patch is applicable to all releases of OpenServer 5.
However, the "install-sse073.sh" program to install the binary
can be used on Release 5.0.6 ONLY.
This patch contains a replacement for the /etc/ntpd binary in
Release 5.0.6. If you wish to use this binary on Releases 5.0.0
up to 5.0.5, you can install the binary manually. Note that
on these older releases, /etc/xntpd (based on NTPv3) was shipped
by default; hence, configuration files based on xntpd may have to
be modified.
Installation:
1. We reccommend you drop into single user mode to install this SSE
(though this is not enforced).
2. Uncompress and extract the SSE into a temporary directory
of the server (eg. /tmp/sse073).
# uncompress sse073.tar.Z
# tar xvf sse073.tar
3. Execute the install script. Follow the instructions
at the prompt.
# ./install-sse073.sh
Note: "Warning" messages simply explain that because a
specific file was not found on the current
server, it was not replaced. If a system has
custom binaries or paths, this patch may not
succeed.
4. Clean up.
A backup of the orginal binaries will be saved in:
/opt/K/SCO/sse/sse073
The following files will be left over after patch
installation and can be removed:
./install-sse073.sh
./sse073.files.tar
The following files will be left over after patch
installation and can be moved to an archival
directory in case the patches are needed again:
./sse073.tar
./sse073.doc
Checksums of the packages:
`sum -r ./sse073.tar`: 53459
`sum -r ./sse073.files.tar`: 61075
References:
The vulnerability addressed in this patch was found by:
Przemyslaw Frasunek <venglin@freebsd.lublin.pl>
For more details, see the following BUGTRAQ archive:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/174011
Disclaimer:
SCO believes that this patch addresses the reported vulnerabilities.
However, in order that it be released as soon as possible, this patch
has not been fully tested or packaged to SCO's normal exacting
standards. For that reason, this patch is not officially supported.
Official supported and packaged fixes for current SCO products will
be available in due course.
If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email.
University of Delaware Affected
Fujitsu Not Affected
Cisco Systems, Inc. Unknown
CVSS Metrics
| Group | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|
| Base | ||
| Temporal | ||
| Environmental |
References
- ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/security/advisories/NetBSD-SA2001-004.txt.asc
- http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/contrib/ntp/ntpd/ntp_control.c?r1+=1.1&r2=1.2
- http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/net/ntp/files/patch-ntp_control.c (patch for ntp-4.0.99k)
- http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1305.html
- http://www.ntp.org/
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/2540
- http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?type=0&doc=secbull%2F211&display=plain
Acknowledgements
The CERT/CC thanks Przemyslaw Frasunek for reporting this issue.
This document was written by Jeffrey S. Havrilla
Other Information
| CVE IDs: | CVE-2001-0414 |
| Severity Metric: | 79.65 |
| Date Public: | 2001-04-04 |
| Date First Published: | 2001-04-05 |
| Date Last Updated: | 2008-05-22 16:42 UTC |
| Document Revision: | 35 |