Heartbeat: Denial of service

Background

Heartbeat is a component of the High-Availability Linux project. It is used to perform death-of-node detection, communications and cluster management.

Description

Yan Rong Ge discovered that the peel_netstring() function in cl_netstring.c does not validate the “length” parameter of user input, which can lead to an out-of-bounds memory access when processing certain Heartbeat messages (CVE-2006-3121). Furthermore an unspecified local DoS issue was fixed (CVE-2006-3815).

Impact

By sending a malicious UDP Heartbeat message, even before authentication, a remote attacker can crash the master control process of the cluster.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Heartbeat users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose sys-cluster/heartbeat