6.5 - RHSA-2015:2241

Problem Description:

Updated chrony packages that fix three security issues, several bugs, and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client (v. 7) - x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode (v. 7) - x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 7) - aarch64, ppc64, ppc64le, s390x, x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 7) - x86_64

3. Description:

The chrony suite, chronyd and chronyc, is an advanced implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), specially designed to support systems with intermittent connections. It can synchronize the system clock with NTP servers, hardware reference clocks, and manual input. It can also operate as an NTPv4 (RFC 5905) server or peer to provide a time service to other computers in the network.

An out-of-bounds write flaw was found in the way chrony stored certain addresses when configuring NTP or cmdmon access. An attacker that has the command key and is allowed to access cmdmon (only localhost is allowed by default) could use this flaw to crash chronyd or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the chronyd process. (CVE-2015-1821)

An uninitialized pointer use flaw was found when allocating memory to save unacknowledged replies to authenticated command requests. An attacker that has the command key and is allowed to access cmdmon (only localhost is allowed by default) could use this flaw to crash chronyd or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the chronyd process. (CVE-2015-1822)

A denial of service flaw was found in the way chrony hosts that were peering with each other authenticated themselves before updating their internal state variables. An attacker could send packets to one peer host, which could cascade to other peers, and stop the synchronization process among the reached peers. (CVE-2015-1853)

These issues were discovered by Miroslav Lichvár of Red Hat.

The chrony packages have been upgraded to upstream version 2.1.1, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. Notable enhancements include:

* Updated to NTP version 4 (RFC 5905)

* Added pool directive to specify pool of NTP servers

* Added leapsecmode directive to select how to correct clock for leap second

* Added smoothtime directive to smooth served time and enable leap smear

* Added asynchronous name resolving with POSIX threads

* Ready for year 2036 (next NTP era)

* Improved clock control

* Networking code reworked to open separate client sockets for each NTP server

(BZ#1117882)

This update also fixes the following bug:

* The chronyd service previously assumed that network interfaces specified with the "bindaddress" directive were ready when the service was started. This could cause chronyd to fail to bind an NTP server socket to the interface if the interface was not ready. With this update, chronyd uses the IP_FREEBIND socket option, enabling it to bind to an interface later, not only when the service starts. (BZ#1169353)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancement:

* The chronyd service now supports four modes of handling leap seconds, configured using the "leapsecmode" option. The clock can be either stepped by the kernel (the default "system" mode), stepped by chronyd ("step" mode), slowly adjusted by slewing ("slew" mode), or the leap second can be ignored and corrected later in normal operation ("ignore" mode). If you select slewing, the correction will always start at 00:00:00 UTC and will be applied at a rate specified in the "maxslewrate" option. (BZ#1206504)

All chrony users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which correct these issues and add these enhancements.

4. Solution:

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

5. Bugs fixed (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/):

1117882 - rebase chrony to 2.1.1 1169353 - Chronyd not starting with bindaddress option set to bond interface 1206504 - RFE: option to correct clock for leap second by slewing 1209568 - RFE: add option for leap smear 1209572 - CVE-2015-1853 chrony: authentication doesn't protect symmetric associations against DoS attacks 1209631 - CVE-2015-1821 chrony: Heap out of bound write in address filter 1209632 - CVE-2015-1822 chrony: uninitialized pointer in cmdmon reply slots 1211600 - RFE: add support for SRV _ntp._udp resolution 1219492 - Use iburst option for NTP servers from DHCP