USN-2449-1: NTP vulnerabilities

22 December 2014

Several security issues were fixed in NTP.

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Releases

Packages

  • ntp - Network Time Protocol daemon and utility programs

Details

Neel Mehta discovered that NTP generated weak authentication keys. A remote
attacker could possibly use this issue to brute force the authentication
key and send requests if permitted by IP restrictions. (CVE-2014-9293)

Stephen Roettger discovered that NTP generated weak MD5 keys. A remote
attacker could possibly use this issue to brute force the MD5 key and spoof
a client or server. (CVE-2014-9294)

Stephen Roettger discovered that NTP contained buffer overflows in the
crypto_recv(), ctl_putdata() and configure() functions. In non-default
configurations, a remote attacker could use these issues to cause NTP to
crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary
code. The default compiler options for affected releases should reduce the
vulnerability to a denial of service. In addition, attackers would be
isolated by the NTP AppArmor profile. (CVE-2014-9295)

Stephen Roettger discovered that NTP incorrectly continued processing when
handling certain errors. (CVE-2014-9296)

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 14.10
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 10.04

After a standard system update you need to regenerate any MD5 keys that
were manually created with ntp-keygen.