oss-sec mailing list archives

kernel: RTO (Retransmission Timeouts) Remote DoS


From: Eugene Teo <eugeneteo () kernel sg>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:44:23 +0800

"Make sure, that TCP has a nonzero RTT estimation after three-way handshake. Currently, a listening TCP has a value of 0 for srtt, rttvar and rto right after the three-way handshake is completed with TCP timestamps disabled. This will lead to corrupt RTO recalculation and retransmission flood when RTO is recalculated on backoff reversion as introduced in "Revert RTO on ICMP destination unreachable" (f1ecd5d9e7366609d640ff4040304ea197fbc618). This behaviour can be provoked by connecting to a server which "responds first" (like SMTP) and rejecting every packet after the handshake with dest-unreachable, which will lead to softirq load on the server (up to 30% per socket in some tests).

Thanks to Ilpo Jarvinen for providing debug patches and to Denys Fedoryshchenko for reporting and testing.

Reported-by: Denys Fedoryshchenko <denys () visp net lb>"

Just a heads-up. Red Hat is not requesting a CVE name for this as it did not affect any of our supported kernels.

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/38355
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=567530
Introduced: f1ecd5d9e7366609d640ff4040304ea197fbc618 - v2.6.32-rc1
Upstream commit: 598856407d4e20ebb4de01a91a93d89325924d43

Thanks, Eugene


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