CVE-2016-8610

Description

A denial of service flaw was found in the way the TLS/SSL protocol defined processing of ALERT packets during a connection handshake. A remote attacker could use this flaw to make a TLS/SSL server consume an excessive amount of CPU and fail to accept connections from other clients.

Statement

This flaw affects applications that are compiled against OpenSSL or GnuTLS and do not allocate an extra thread for processing ClientHello messages. Nginx is affected by this issue; Apache httpd is not affected by this issue. This issue has been rated as having a security impact of Moderate. It requires an attacker to send a very large amount of SSL ALERT messages to the host network connection. This issue can also be mitigated by configuring firewalls to limit the number of connections per IP address, or use deep packet inspection to reject these type of alert packets. A future update may address this issue.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score7.57.5N/A
Attack VectorNetworkNetworkN/A
Attack ComplexityLowLowN/A
Privileges RequiredNoneNoneN/A
User InteractionNoneNoneN/A
ScopeUnchangedUnchangedN/A
ConfidentialityNoneNoneN/A
Integrity ImpactNoneNoneN/A
Availability ImpactHighHighN/A

Vector

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

NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Acknowledgements

Red Hat would like to thank Shi Lei (Gear Team of Qihoo 360 Inc.) for reporting this issue.

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