CVE-2018-5391

A flaw named FragmentSmack was found in the way the Linux kernel handled reassembly of fragmented IPv4 and IPv6 packets. A remote attacker could use this flaw to trigger time and calculation expensive fragment reassembly algorithm by sending specially crafted packets which could lead to a CPU saturation and hence a denial of service on the system.

Mitigation

One may change the default 4MB and 3MB values of net.ipv4.ipfrag_high_thresh and net.ipv4.ipfrag_low_thresh (and their ipv6 counterparts net.ipv6.ipfrag_high_thresh and net.ipv6.ipfrag_low_thresh) to 256 kB and 192 kB (respectively) or below. Tests show some to significant CPU saturation drop during an attack, depending on a hardware, configuration and environment.

There can be some impact on performance though, due to ipfrag_high_thresh of 262144 bytes, as only two 64K fragments can fit in the reassembly queue at the same time. For example, there is a risk of breaking applications that rely on large UDP packets.

See the Mitigation section in the <https://access.redhat.com/articles/3553061&gt; article for the script to quickly change to/from default and lower settings.