Denial Of Service (DoS)

openswan is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS). The vulnerability exists as a use-after-free flaw was found in the way Openswan’s pluto IKE daemon used cryptographic helpers. A remote, authenticated attacker could send a specially-crafted IKE packet that would crash the pluto daemon. This issue only affected SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems that have the cryptographic helpers enabled. The helpers are disabled by default on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, but enabled by default on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.