CVE-2015-5300

Description

It was found that ntpd did not correctly implement the threshold limitation for the '-g' option, which is used to set the time without any restrictions. A man-in-the-middle attacker able to intercept NTP traffic between a connecting client and an NTP server could use this flaw to force that client to make multiple steps larger than the panic threshold, effectively changing the time to an arbitrary value at any time.

Statement

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now in Production 3 Phase of the support and maintenance life cycle. This has been rated as having Moderate security impact and is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/

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 v2 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score4.35N/A
Attack VectorNetworkNetworkN/A
Access ComplexityMediumLowN/A
AuthenticationNoneNoneN/A
Confidentiality ImpactNoneNoneN/A
Integrity ImpactPartialNoneN/A
Availability ImpactNonePartialN/A

Vector

Red Hat: AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

NVD: AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Availability

Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart; DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)

An attacker could provide unexpected values and cause a program crash or arbitrary control of resource allocation, leading to excessive consumption of resources such as memory and CPU.

Confidentiality

Technical Impact: Read Memory; Read Files or Directories

An attacker could read confidential data if they are able to control resource references.

Integrity,Confidentiality,Availability

Technical Impact: Modify Memory; Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands

An attacker could use malicious input to modify data or possibly alter control flow in unexpected ways, including arbitrary command execution.

Acknowledgements

Red Hat would like to thank Aanchal Malhotra (Boston University), Isaac E. Cohen (Boston University), and Sharon Goldberg (Boston University) for reporting this issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

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