It was found that glusterfs server is vulnerable to mulitple stack based buffer overflows due to functions in server-rpc-fopc.c allocating fixed size buffers using ‘alloca(3)’. An authenticated attacker could exploit this by mounting a gluster volume and sending a string longer that the fixed buffer size to cause crash or potential code execution.
To limit exposure of gluster server nodes :
1. gluster server should be on LAN and not reachable from public networks.
2. Use gluster auth.allow and auth.reject.
3. Use TLS certificates to authenticate gluster clients.
caveat: This does not protect from attacks by authenticated gluster clients.