Debian DLA-193-1 : chrony security update

medium Nessus Plugin ID 82716

Synopsis

The remote Debian host is missing a security update.

Description

CVE-2015-1853 :

Protect authenticated symmetric NTP associations against DoS attacks.

An attacker knowing that NTP hosts A and B are peering with each other (symmetric association) can send a packet with random timestamps to host A with source address of B which will set the NTP state variables on A to the values sent by the attacker. Host A will then send on its next poll to B a packet with originate timestamp that doesn't match the transmit timestamp of B and the packet will be dropped. If the attacker does this periodically for both hosts, they won't be able to synchronize to each other. It is a denial of service attack.

According to [1], NTP authentication is supposed to protect symmetric associations against this attack, but in the NTPv3 (RFC 1305) and NTPv4 (RFC 5905) specifications the state variables are updated before the authentication check is performed, which means the association is vulnerable to the attack even when authentication is enabled.

To fix this problem, save the originate and local timestamps only when the authentication check (test5) passed.

[1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/onwire.html

CVE-2015-1821 :

Fix access configuration with subnet size indivisible by 4.

When NTP or cmdmon access was configured (from chrony.conf or via authenticated cmdmon) with a subnet size that is indivisible by 4 and an address that has nonzero bits in the 4-bit subnet remainder (e.g. 192.168.15.0/22 or f000::/3), the new setting was written to an incorrect location, possibly outside the allocated array.

An attacker that has the command key and is allowed to access cmdmon (only localhost is allowed by default) could exploit this to crash chronyd or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the chronyd process.

CVE-2015-1822 :

Fix initialization of reply slots for authenticated commands.

When allocating memory to save unacknowledged replies to authenticated command requests, the last 'next' pointer was not initialized to NULL. When all allocated reply slots were used, the next reply could be written to an invalid memory instead of allocating a new slot for it.

An attacker that has the command key and is allowed to access cmdmon (only localhost is allowed by default) could exploit this to crash chronyd or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the chronyd process.

NOTE: Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the DLA security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Solution

Upgrade the affected chrony package.

See Also

https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/04/msg00008.html

https://packages.debian.org/source/squeeze-lts/chrony

https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/onwire.html

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 82716

File Name: debian_DLA-193.nasl

Version: 1.9

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 4/13/2015

Updated: 1/11/2021

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.5

Temporal Score: 4.8

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:P

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.5

Temporal Score: 5.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:chrony, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:6.0

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/Debian/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 4/12/2015

Vulnerability Publication Date: 4/16/2015

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2015-1821, CVE-2015-1822, CVE-2015-1853

BID: 73948, 73955, 73956