(RHSA-2016:0532) Moderate: krb5 security update

Kerberos is a network authentication system, which can improve the security of your network by eliminating the insecure practice of sending passwords over the network in unencrypted form. It allows clients and servers to authenticate to each other with the help of a trusted third party, the Kerberos key distribution center (KDC).

Security Fix(es):

• A memory leak flaw was found in the krb5_unparse_name() function of the MIT Kerberos kadmind service. An authenticated attacker could repeatedly send specially crafted requests to the server, which could cause the server to consume large amounts of memory resources, ultimately leading to a denial of service due to memory exhaustion. (CVE-2015-8631)

• An out-of-bounds read flaw was found in the kadmind service of MIT Kerberos. An authenticated attacker could send a maliciously crafted message to force kadmind to read beyond the end of allocated memory, and write the memory contents to the KDC database if the attacker has write permission, leading to information disclosure. (CVE-2015-8629)

• A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the procedure used by the MIT Kerberos kadmind service to store policies: the kadm5_create_principal_3() and kadm5_modify_principal() function did not ensure that a policy was given when KADM5_POLICY was set. An authenticated attacker with permissions to modify the database could use this flaw to add or modify a principal with a policy set to NULL, causing the kadmind service to crash. (CVE-2015-8630)

The CVE-2015-8631 issue was discovered by Simo Sorce of Red Hat.