soup4you2
March 3rd, 2004, 09:26
This Sucks!!!! Being forced to upgrade...

[code:1:deb12ddfd9]
I. Background

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) of the TCP/IP protocol suite provides a connection-oriented, reliable, sequence-preserving data stream service. When network packets making up a TCP stream (``TCP segments'') are received out-of-sequence, they are maintained in areassembly queue by the destination system until they can be re-ordered and re-assembled.

II. Problem Description

FreeBSD does not limit the number of TCP segments that may be held in a reassembly queue.

III. Impact


A remote attacker may conduct a low-bandwidth denial-of-service attack against a machine providing services based on TCP (there are many such services, including HTTP, SMTP, and FTP). By sending many out-of-sequence TCP segments, the attacker can cause the target machine to consume all available memory buffers (``mbufs''), likely leading to a system crash.

IV. Workaround

It may be possible to mitigate some denial-of-service attacks by implementing timeouts at the application level.

V. Solution

Do one of the following:

1) Upgrade your vulnerable system to 4-STABLE, or to the RELENG_5_2, RELENG_4_9, or RELENG_4_8 security branch dated after the correction date.

OR

2) Patch your present system:

The following patch has been verified to apply to FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x systems.

a) Download the relevant patch from the location below, and verify the detached PGP signature using your PGP utility.

[FreeBSD 5.2]
# fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/C...:04/tcp52.patch
# fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/C...tcp52.patch.asc

[FreeBSD 4.8, 4.9]
# fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/C...:04/tcp47.patch
# fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/C...tcp47.patch.asc

b) Apply the patch.

# cd /usr/src
# patch < /path/to/patch

c) Recompile your kernel as described in
and reboot the system.

VI. Correction details

The following list contains the revision numbers of each file that was corrected in FreeBSD.

Branch Revision
Path
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
RELENG_4
src/UPDATING 1.73.2.90
src/sys/conf/newvers.sh 1.44.2.33
src/sys/netinet/tcp_input.c 1.107.2.40
src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c 1.73.2.33
src/sys/netinet/tcp_var.h 1.56.2.15
RELENG_5_2
src/UPDATING 1.282.2.9
src/sys/conf/newvers.sh 1.56.2.8
src/sys/netinet/tcp_input.c 1.217.2.2
src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c 1.169.2.4
src/sys/netinet/tcp_var.h 1.93.2.2
RELENG_4_9
src/UPDATING 1.73.2.89.2.4
src/sys/conf/newvers.sh 1.44.2.32.2.4
src/sys/netinet/tcp_input.c 1.107.2.38.2.1
src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c 1.73.2.31.4.1
src/sys/netinet/tcp_var.h 1.56.2.13.4.1
RELENG_4_8
src/UPDATING 1.73.2.80.2.19
src/sys/conf/newvers.sh 1.44.2.29.2.17
src/sys/netinet/tcp_input.c 1.107.2.37.2.1
src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c 1.73.2.31.2.1
src/sys/netinet/tcp_var.h 1.56.2.13.2.1
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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