1.6. avahi

Updated avahi packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

Avahi is an implementation of the DNS Service Discovery and Multicast DNS specifications for Zero Configuration Networking. It facilitates service discovery on a local network. Avahi and Avahi-aware applications allow you to plug your computer into a network and, with no configuration, view other people to chat with, view printers to print to, and find shared files on other computers.

A flaw was found in the way the Avahi daemon (avahi-daemon) processed Multicast DNS (mDNS) packets with an empty payload. An attacker on the local network could use this flaw to cause avahi-daemon on a target system to enter an infinite loop via an empty mDNS UDP packet. (CVE-2011-1002)

All users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. After installing the update, avahi-daemon will be restarted automatically.