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What Do I Need To Know about “SegmentSmack”

  • 期号: SRE Weekly Issue #134(2018-08-12)
  • 作者: Johannes B. Ullrich, PhD — SAN Technology Institute
  • 链接: https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/What Do I Need To Know about SegmentSmack/23964/

简介

The big news this week is SegmentSmack, a denial of service vulnerability in the Linux kernel that allows an attacker to cause high CPU consumption. Linked is a SANS Technology Institute researcher’s summary of the attack. Other coverage:AWSAkamaiFastlyCERTUbuntuRedhat

正文

What Do I Need To Know about "SegmentSmack"

3 comment(s)

"SegmentSmack" is yet another branded vulnerability, also known as CVE-2018–5390. It hit the "news" yesterday. Succesful exploitation may lead to a denial of service against a targeted system. At this point, not a lot is known about this vulnerability. But here are some highlights:

  • Linux Kernel 4.9 is vulnerable. Older versions are not vulnerable. However, some Linux distributions like RedHat ES 6 and 7 include the vulnerable code as they backported some of the 4.9 networking code into their kernels
  • An attacker should not be able to exploit this vulnerability using a spoofed IP address. The attacker needs to first establish a TCP connection which is very difficult with a spoofed address.
  • It is not known how much traffic the attacker will have to send. But likely not more than a user would send in a normal TCP connection.
  • The attack can be launched against any exposed TCP service (Web, Mail, DNS...)
  • The vulnerable functions, tcp_collapse_ofo_queue() and tcp_prune_ofo_queue(), are used to deal with reassembling TCP segments. This likely implies that an exploit would use many out of order or otherwise abnormal packets. But this is just a guess at this point.
  • If you are vulnerable, your best bet is to update. There is likely not much else you can do (e.g. firewall rules)

You can find more details here: https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/962459


Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D., Dean of Research, SANS Technology Institute

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Aug 8th 2018

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Aug 10th 2018

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Aug 28th 2018

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