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Posted on 22 July 2015
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FreeBSD-SA-15:13.tcp Security Advisory
The FreeBSD Project
Topic: Resource exhaustion due to sessions stuck in LAST_ACK state
Category: core
Module: inet
Announced: 2015-07-21
Credits: Lawrence Stewart (Netflix, Inc.),
Jonathan Looney (Juniper SIRT)
Affects: All supported versions of FreeBSD.
Corrected: 2015-07-21 23:42:17 UTC (stable/10, 10.2-PRERELEASE)
2015-07-21 23:42:17 UTC (stable/10, 10.2-BETA1-p1)
2015-07-21 23:42:17 UTC (stable/10, 10.2-BETA2-p1)
2015-07-21 23:42:56 UTC (releng/10.1, 10.1-RELEASE-p15)
2015-07-21 23:42:20 UTC (stable/9, 9.3-STABLE)
2015-07-21 23:42:56 UTC (releng/9.3, 9.3-RELEASE-p20)
2015-07-21 23:42:20 UTC (stable/8, 8.4-STABLE)
2015-07-21 23:42:56 UTC (releng/8.4, 8.4-RELEASE-p34)
CVE Name: CVE-2015-5358
For general information regarding FreeBSD Security Advisories,
including descriptions of the fields above, security branches, and the
following sections, please visit <URL:https://security.FreeBSD.org/>.
I. Background
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) of the TCP/IP protocol suite
provides a connection-oriented, reliable, sequence-preserving data
stream service.
A socket enters the LAST_ACK state when the local process closes its socket
after a FIN has already been received from the remote peer. The socket
will remain in the LAST_ACK state until the kernel has transmitted a FIN to
the remote peer and the kernel has received an acknowledgement of that FIN
from the remote peer, or all retransmits of the FIN have failed and the
connection times out.
II. Problem Description
TCP connections transitioning to the LAST_ACK state can become permanently
stuck due to mishandling of protocol state in certain situations, which in
turn can lead to accumulated consumption and eventual exhaustion of system
resources, such as mbufs and sockets.
III. Impact
An attacker who can repeatedly establish TCP connections to a victim system
(for instance, a Web server) could create many TCP connections that are
stuck in LAST_ACK state and cause resource exhaustion, resulting in a
denial of service condition. This may also happen in normal operation
where no intentional attack is conducted, but an attacker who can send
specifically crafted packets can trigger this more reliably.
IV. Workaround
No workaround is available, but systems that do not provide TCP based
service to untrusted networks are not vulnerable.
Note that the tcpdrop(8) utility can be used to purge connections which
have become wedged. For example, the following command can be used to
generate commands that would drop all connections whose last rcvtime is
more than 100s:
netstat -nxp tcp |
awk '{ if (int($NF) > 100) print "tcpdrop " $4 " " $5 }'
The system administrator can then run the generated script as a temporary
measure. Please refer to the tcpdump(8) manual page for additional
information.
V. Solution
Perform one of the following:
1) Upgrade your vulnerable system to a supported FreeBSD stable or
release / security branch (releng) dated after the correction date.
2) To update your vulnerable system via a binary patch:
Systems running a RELEASE version of FreeBSD on the i386 or amd64
platforms can be updated via the freebsd-update(8) utility:
# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install
3) To update your vulnerable system via a source code patch:
The following patches have been verified to apply to the applicable
FreeBSD release branches.
a) Download the relevant patch from the location below, and verify the
detached PGP signature using your PGP utility.
[FreeBSD 10.1]
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-15:13/tcp.patch
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-15:13/tcp.patch.asc
# gpg --verify tcp.patch.asc
[FreeBSD 9.x and 8.x]
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-15:13/tcp-9.patch
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-15:13/tcp-9.patch.asc
# gpg --verify tcp-9.patch.asc
b) Apply the patch. Execute the following commands as root:
# cd /usr/src
# patch < /path/to/patch
c) Recompile your kernel as described in
<URL:https://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/kernelconfig.html> and reboot the
system.
VI. Correction details
The following list contains the correction revision numbers for each
affected branch.
Branch/path Revision
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
stable/8/ r285779
releng/8.4/ r285780
stable/9/ r285779
releng/9.3/ r285780
stable/10/ r285778
releng/10.1/ r285780
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
To see which files were modified by a particular revision, run the
following command, replacing NNNNNN with the revision number, on a
machine with Subversion installed:
# svn diff -cNNNNNN --summarize svn://svn.freebsd.org/base
Or visit the following URL, replacing NNNNNN with the revision number:
<URL:https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=NNNNNN>
VII. References
<URL:https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-5358>
The latest revision of this advisory is available at
<URL:https://security.FreeBSD.org/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-15:13.tcp.asc>
